Met a great couple.

Day fifteen
Distance travelled: 105.5 miles
Time in saddle: 9hrs 23 mins
Overall distance: 1366 miles
I was freezing last night. I managed to drop off but woke through the night dithering. In the end I put my coat on and used my thick cycling top as leg warmers. I put my feet through the sleeves….ingenious hey?
I finally got up about seven o’clock and put my tent away. It was wet trough from the frost the previous night. I was sleeping at about eight thousand feet so it was to be expected.
As I cycled up a cycle path a guy rode beside me called Randy…I was hoping that he fitted heaters in transits…he would be Randy Van Warmer. You’ve got to have been around in the seventies to get that one. He was a really nice guy. About the same age as me but on a lighter bike, which makes all the difference and he was probably fitter. He’d done some serious riding in his youth. He helped me over the first mountain. It was good to have some company. He turned around at the top of the first hill and I was on my own again. As I came out of a rest room two guys were looking at my bike. I got chatting to them and they seemed some genuine interested in what I was doing. That has happened a lot on this trip and its great to chat to these people.
Up to now I didn’t really find the Rockies that difficult. Yes there were some hills but nothing serious. That was to change when I reached Loveland Pass. It was a massive 11900feet high and every inch a bugger. As I reached the ski resort at what I thought was the summit. I asked three guys where the summit was. They informed me that it was a further four miles up the hill. I was gutted. One of the guys very kindly asked me if I wanted a lift. Over the last couple of days I’ve been offered a lift at least five times. This was the only one I gave a second thought to. I was hanging out my pants as they say and for a second very tempted. I declined and kept going. I had to walk the last two miles and it hurt….but I didn’t get the lift…I’m so glad now.
I had another puncture today and two of my spare inner tubes were damaged so I looked for a bike shop in the town I’d just entered. The town was called Silverthorne. The bike shop was a godsend, again. I bought four new inner tubes and a new tyre. A guy called Bob help me and we had a good chat about everything.
As I was in the shop paying for my stuff, which turned out to be ridiculously cheap I got chatting to a couple that were also in the shop buying stuff. Brian and Sephora asked me what I was doing and where I intended to stop for the night. I told them that I was aiming for Denver, but I might not make it because of the mountain that I had to climb as well as it being over seventy miles away…it was afternoon by then and I’d already done thirty five miles that morning. Sephora said that if I got to Denver I could pitch my tent at their place, which was very nice of them. I set off to do the hill and eventually started to build speed up as I came down the other side of the mountain. I was conscious of the fact that I had somewhere to stay and was a little worried that it would be late when I got there. I cycled like a madman and was doing really well on highway 70. In full flow I was pulled up by the police and told that I couldn’t cycle on this stretch of the highway. The policeman was very nice and courteous and told me I had to get off at the next junction. I looked for highway 40, which would take me to where Brian and Sephora lived in Golden, a suburb of Denver. I got lost….the directions in the states are not very good. I went to a petrol station to ask the way, but didn’t have any luck. As I cycled back to the main road, the way out was not clear. I cycled down a steep road to what I thought was the exit. It wasn’t. In fact it was a closed road with a large chain across. Because of the direction of the setting sun I didn’t see it. I nearly did a summersault with my feet still in the peddles. I hit the floor like a sack of s**t. I jumped up really embarrassed and had a quick check over of the bike. It was perfect….the thick chain was snapped in half…that’s how fast I was going. Gusher can put up with anything, thank God.
After looking around for the road I asked another guy which direction I needed to go. He told me that I would have to go onto Highway 70 for two miles to get to highway 40. This was worrying as I had already been stopped once, a second time and they wouldn’t be so understanding. I wnt for it and peddled like the clappers for two miles. I eventually arrived at Brian’s and Sephor’s house, which is very nice. They had cooked something for me, let me have a shower and had made a bed up for me to sleep in…amazing. I certainly didn’t expect all the trouble that they had gone to and it was very much appreciated. They are a really nice couple and we had a really good chat over dinner. They even planned my route out of Denver, which like all cities is very busy for cyclists. It’s moments like this that make this trip worthwhile…great people.