Day 35 – Rawlins, Wyoming to Saratoga, Wyoming

Cruising on the Interstate

Back in 1985 when I rode from Washington to Maine with a group of eleven,  three of us took a side trip into Minneapolis for a few days.  We took the most direct route, which meant riding into the city illegally on the interstate highway. I’m not sure how we weren’t pulled over.  Probably because there were no cell phones back then where drivers could alert the authorities.

On Wednesday I was back on the interstate, now on I-80, but this time it was perfectly legal.

After leaving Rawlins, and taking a wrong turn that amounted to two extra miles, I followed route 76, which parallels I-80.  I’ve talked about the winds many times, but this time it was the best tailwind yet and I was easily keeping up a pace of over 20 mph. Route 76 then takes you through the oil refinery town of Sinclair– there are Sinclair gas stations all over out here.

Once through Sinclair, route 76 ends and your only choice is to get on the interstate, and that’s why riding a bike is legal on this stretch.  But this isn’t an interstate that compares with going through a big city.  There’s hardly any traffic and a very wide shoulder.

As I entered onto I-80 I soon noticed that I was cruising at 28 mph and even made it up to 31 as there was a gradual downhill. It was fantastic and this kept up for quite some time.  I had heard about bits of debris being on the shoulder of the road, but it looked clean as could be. So it was smooth sailing.

Eventually the downhill became more of an uphill and it was getting a bit warm so  I stopped to take my jacket off. Once back on the road I noticed that my rear tire felt a little soft as I was riding.  This has happened several times throughout the trip and always when I pinched the tire to see if I was getting a flat it was always a false alarm. Not this time.  The tire wasn’t flat, but was getting very low.

I wasn’t going to  fix it on the side of the interstate so I took out my pump and inflated it, thinking it would get me to the exit that was just three miles up the road and was the exit I needed to take anyway.  Once there I stopped at the only business around, a Shell gas station. Here I deflated the tire and got my patch kit and tire irons out.

These tires are labeled as “hard casing” and are more reinforced to prevent flats.  I’ve never used them before and one thing I found out was that prying the tire off the rim with the tire iron was very difficult. Much more difficult than any standard tire I’ve fixed before. So instead of wasting time I decided to pump it up again fully and try to ride the 20 miles to Saratoga, inflating it when I needed to along the way and then patching it when I got to camp.

This worked out fairly well.  One problem was that when I had exited the interstate I was now heading south instead of due east, so the fantastic tailwind was gone and now it was more of a big crosswind and the riding immediately became harder. In any case, as I neared Saratoga I had to pump up the tire more frequently, but I eventually got there.

Once in Saratoga after the 46 mile ride and settled in at camp I was able to take more time and fix it.  I picked out a tiny sliver of metal, which I had heard litter the shoulder of the interstate.  So  after over 1,600 miles of riding, that’s the first flat of the trip.

Saratoga is a nice town with a population of around 1,600.  I stopped by the Saratoga Hot Springs, which was great and then also by a Conoco station to get a Gatorade.  Here a woman was talking to her friend the cashier.  I walked up in the middle of a conversation.  “Well, Mike is out on parole now.”  “Yeah, I know.  He keeps asking me to be friends on Facebook, but I don’t want anything to do with him.” I wonder what Mike did.

The next few days will be long, steady climbing, which should all end on Sunday with the climb over Hoosier Pass.  At 11,542 feet this is the highest point on the entire trip.  After that it will be a lot of downhill riding that finally gets me out of the higher elevations and eventually through Colorado– which I’ll enter today– and then on to the flats of Kansas.