Dinosaur, Colorado!

Whew! Today was a toughy. In fact, the past few days have been challenging. Since I'm sure most of you reading this have probably already heard from others about past days I will try to keep the update short.

Friday was our day to sweep. It was a very long day for us even though the ride wasn't too bad in itself.  The headwind slowed us down and we also made many stops on the way. Thankfully we had Theo and Eric pulling us along most of the way. It still ended up being about 12 hours from the time Heidi and I woke up to the time we got into camp. So! We were pretty exhausted that night.  Just looking at the map for Saturday was very daunting. 

Saturday was one of the toughest rides of the tour.  After 100 km of riding we still had to conquer 2 mountain summits and a few hills afterwards. We passed through Salt Lake City and moved on to Park City - a small but very beautiful (and wealthy) tourist town that housed some of the Olympic ski runs.  It took us about 12 hours on the road to get to Jordanelle Park where we camped for the weekend - we arrived at 7.  The park was absolutely stunning, although very spacious with a lot of walking to get from place to place. 

Sunday was a much needed day of rest. The service was at night so we got to sleep in! We toured the town most of the day and just relaxed. It was fabulous. 

Monday was another grueling ride. We're convinced Ed didn't provide us with an elevation chart for a reason. However, we made it up over the mountain summit - an elevation of over 9000 feet. A huge plus for us that day was cloud cover which kept the temperature down.  At the top of the mountain we took a small hike off the road up to a patch of snow with all the Stehouwers to have a small snowball fight. The wild flowers at the top were beautiful and the ride down was breathtaking! However, at the bottom of the descent we still had a long ways to go, including a few smaller climbs.  The last portion into camp was a welcomed descent that overlooked Starvation Lake. We made it into camp late in the afternoon again. 

As I mentioned before, today was tiring. The first 2/3 of the ride were fairly enjoyable, although the shoulder of the highway we rode on was a bit tight in places. Dodging glass, gravel, roadkill, and bits of tires while trying to avoid the rumble strip and angry drivers was a bit challenging. However, the last part of the ride got a lot tougher. The last 30 km were uphill and against a strong wind.  About 10 km outside of Dinosaur many people were losing hope quickly. Our destination was so close and yet so very far away. We still made it into camp at around 3:30 where there was delicious watermelon waiting as usual. 

Hopefully we will keep this blog a bit more updated in the future - most of the time we are just so tired coming into camp and internet is always a challenge. I am quite amazed at all those who can blog so faithfully. Hopefully we will get pictures up in the near future as well.

 Thanks for all the support and prayers! We can hardly wait to get into Ontario!