What's Fred Up To Now?: Day 22 - Sunday June 10; Pueblo, CO to Canon City, CO (55 miles)

I had a great night's sleep last night and my body felt rejuvinated. I was off by 6:30AM . After a pleasant ride through the western suburbs of Pueblo under a clear blue sky, I reached the city limit at 7:00 PM. The temperature was a little on the cool side and never did get too warm. Yesterday it was very hot so my rest day paid off double.

There was a nice, moderate climb along the boundary of Pueblo Lake SP. The scenery after that was terrific. I'd finally reached the Rockies. After this initial climb, the ride was a gradual climb for miles followed by one last mile-long gut buster of a climb that topped out at about 6,200 feet and into the small town of Wetmore. Wetmore was 31 miles from today's start and the map showed it as having a grocery store/cafe - but nothing was open. I ate some gorp and headed off to Florence - 11 miles of some SWEET downhill. I hardly had to pedal the whole way. That's the good news. The bad news is that I gave up nearly all of the elevation gain I had achieved!

Near Florence I passed a very nice federal prison. It seems like Colorado has at least it's fair share of these. It looked like there were two sections; one surrounded by a double fence with razor wire at the top and another that might have been minimum-security (no fence at all). During the ride, I saw a number of federal prisons, including an old one leaving Canon City (tomorrow's ride). [It turns out the old one in Canon City is no longer an active prison and is now the Colorado Prison Museum. Also, the on I passed just before Florence is one of four Supermax prisons in the US and houses many notorious prisoners including foreign and domestic terrorists and high profile gang members. These are the worst of the worst.]

There was a Carl's Junior just as I entered Florence and since it was nearly 11:00 AM I decided to stop for lunch. Canon City, my planned stopping point for today, was only nine more miles. While eating, another west-bound cyclist stopped in. Max is from London and touring the US this summer. He started in Charleston, SC and rode north along the Atlantic for a while then turned west and hooked up with the TransAmerica route. He plans to go all the way west on this route then ride south along the Pacific to San Francisco and to Los Angeles where he will fly back to London. [I saw Max later in the week when climbing Hoosier Pass. We took each others photos at the top]. There were several towns between Florence and Canon City and traffic was moderate so I wasn't able to take in much scenery. I reached the Canon City RV Campground around 1:00 PM. In addition to being three miles off the route to the east, the place was pretty much a dump. The tent area didn't look like it had been used by anyone in a long time as it was overgrown with weeds. There were only a few other inhabitants in RVs and a tent trailer, some of which appeared to have been there for a while. Anyway, I decided to seek other accomodations and began checking motel rates. I'm staying at the Budget Host. It's clean and the owner let me wash today's cycling clothes for free in the facility laundry. I should be able to get a good rest for tommorow's ride to Guffey, about 35 miles, but possibly the hardest day of climbing for the whole trip.

A few photos from today follow.