wheelin' through the Rockies, part 3

Day 12: Montrose to Gunnison

Les and I decided that Gunnison must be filled with lots of guns and lots of sons (probably in the olden days it was called "guns 'n sons" and was later shortened so as to ensure a healthy economy!).  If so then soon, either due to an over population of males, or an over population of vagrant guns sleeping in gutters and on bus benches, this city will be nothing more than a bunch of abandon buildings with a river running through it.  Fortunately for tourists like les and I, there appears to be females and, by the looks of things, no half asleep homeless guns waking up cranky and disturbing the public.

ok ok, bad joke!

The abode of the generous Shine's.  Thanks again guys!

Anyway, our day began with Les and I sleeping a bit longer than we planned, but can you blame us?  We have the Rockies to climb!  We ate breakfast, hit the store, broke apart les' old helmet (see video below), then hit the road. 

The helmet is dead... affirmative, we poked it, it was dead.

White helmet = dead, pic 1

White helmet = dead, pic 2

Oh yeah, the ride!  The day started out with a steady incline and WIND!!!  But whoever said wind and hills were bad things?  Not us!  We laughed at it (and to all you who commented on our last post that it seems like we're going a little insane, you're probably right...) and begged it to be steeper and hit us harder!  It didn't though, and we figured it was scared!  The Rockies are ours!  (by the way, we really only have one more day of riding in these magnificent, picturesque mountains until we begin to descend into eastern Colorado and then bleak, flat Kansas!  :(  (that's a sad face, by the way) )

A shot of the hillside as we climbed our second hill of two today

Les loves to sing, chant, and state influential sayings when the riding gets a bit tougher (see the video below--again, yes, we might be going a little crazy!)

Les sings and stuff!

We met three other tourists while riding today.  All three of them happened to have the same bike as me (Aaron).  Here is a picture of three (of four) tired Surly's.

As we continued down the 50 we noticed that our water supply was running quite low, so we pulled off the road to fill up.  The place we found (or rather didn't find) water was called Sapinero.  Armed with an abandoned school house, and abandoned gas station, and some kind of abandoned general store, this city was not looking very promising in terms of satisfying our water needs.  We went around back and looked for a spicket, pail, trough (most likely given how old this place looked), faucet, or ANYTHING that produced water.  But we didn't find anything.  So we did what any thirsty person would do: we walked up a dirt path leading to a mobile home park just above.  While there were plenty of mobile homes (seeming to indicate plenty of life) there was nobody to be found.  After looking around for a few moments we just turned on a hose and, like the train-robbers we are, filled up.  Job complete.

Aaron looking a little less than terrifying while "borrowing" water

Gunnison, so far, seems to be a pretty cool place.  We are staying with a guy named Joe who we found on couch surfers.com.  From looking at his profile on the website he seems to be a pretty cool guy, so we are looking forward to hanging out with he and his roommates tonight. 

Longest hill ride of the trip tomorrow, but the pictures we'll take from it will make up for everything!  Until then...