the journey begins

9am fellow road trip and summer working companion, Lewis, and I departed from Lakeville, Minnesota and began the cross-country trek to Estes Park, CO. Twas quite the adventure, setting a random address into my cell phone's GPS and blindly following whatever road karmin the garmin told us to take!

4 hours into the trip, it got HOT. Phewww! Especially when we hit Nebraska, the land of steaming 90 degree asphalt, where you have to drive upwards of 10 miles off the freeway in order to find a gas station. However, the gamble purchase of a cheap 2 bike rack was still holding up quite nicely--no casualties yet! (knock on wood...)

We also passed through a town called SHELBY!!! So kind of them to name a town after me!

Around 7pm we were starving. After sadly missing several exits that had signs of all the nice normal fast food restaurants, we pulled off at some extremely sketchy tavern in old Julesburg, Colorado--a town that bore an uncanny resemblance to Gatlin from Stephen King's Children of the Corn. I half expected to be mauled by a small child wielding a large chisel as we touristic-ally perused the streets for any type of food-like sustenance. But the tavern turned out to be a pretty classy hangout for all the old locals and could make some mean potato wedge fries. Kudos to pseudo-Gatlin's local bar!

As we were leaving, some sweet heat lightning narrowly missed singing Lewis's hair and the strangest storm started to brew. It never actually rained, but it sure looked like the dawn of the apocalypse...must have been old "He Who Walks Between the Rows..."

We pulled into the Chamberlain house in Estes Park, CO around midnight, and I set up my lil tent in the backyard. It was an angry battle of stakes, poles and rain fly, and the end result was a sad sagging green blob that was DEFINITELY not going to be waterproof if it started to rain. (I discovered the next day that the rainfly actually sinches up to the stakes and looks a lot less like a drooping blanket somebody flung over a pile of poles....I'm hoping my tent and I will develop a better relationship as the summer progresses.)

The tent; in all it's drooping glory