What a dramatic change in scenery and topography! We left Denver this morning at 6:00 AM and headed east. Colorado has two very distinct regions. The mountains cover then entire western half of the state with 14,000 foot mountains. There is a mountain climbing club that people join to say that they have climbed all the 14000 foot mountains in Colorado. There are 58 14,000 ft. mountains in Colorado. You can join the 14ers club in hopes that you can climb all 58 mountains.
The other half of the state (where we are now)is all prairie at 5400 feet above sea level. It consists of wheat field after wheat field. The grain elevator in the picture is where all the farmers haul their crops to get paid the current days price for that commodity. Most of the wheat grown here goes to China. The towns are very small, less than 300 people and they live very simple lives, sometimes making just enough to pay their bills.
The ominous sky made us look into getting a motel for the night. Good thing we did. It is hailing and 50 mph winds as I write this. This same hotel experienced softball size hail on Sunday that broke 26 windows. The Comfort Inn next door is closed with over 80 broken windows. The car dealer in town had 230 cars severely damaged. Any cars that were outside have broken windshields. We are glad that we missed that storm!
We did have one minor mishap today. The map indicated that there was a frontage road then a paved road west to avoid the highway. The map was wrong. The frontage road ended at NO OUTLET. We had to lift our bicycles over a 5 foot barbed wire fence and scale a 60 foot steep embankment to get up to the highway.
No comments:
Post a Comment