I’m not much of a gravel rider. As I told Brittney and Kelly, “Gravel is sort of that mediocre middle between road and mountain. With mountain, you can ride over boulders, huck your bike off jumps, and adjust the suspension for the terrain. With road, it’s just smooth and fast.”
My most used phrase over the weekend was, “I should have brought my mountain bike.”
I wouldn’t have had as much fun on these roads had it not been for the company though.
I rolled into Westcliffe around 7:00 PM on Friday. Kelly and Brittney arrived 20 minutes before me. The 3-hour drive wasn’t all that bad, thanks to The Last Podcast on the Left. If you like learning about serial killers’ lives told by three men who are smart, incredibly dorky, funny, and witty as hell, then you’ll love it. Chris introduced me to the podcast when we drove 8 hours to Roswell over the summer and it made the time fly by.
I listened to Episode 419: Jodi Arias Part I on the way down until I lost service. Not only was the relationship between Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander (who she killed) covered but also “WAP” by Cardi B. Ben, Henry, and Marcus weren’t sure how “ass” was being used in “Wet Ass Pussy” so there is very much an analysis of it.
I knew what kind of town I was in when I saw all the Trump/Pence signs in front yards. Oddly enough, Google took me to a plot of land instead of the house so I had to call Kelly for a pin drop. Once I brought in all my bags and parked my bike inside, we headed into town (which is a single Main Steet). Being a small town, nearly everything was closed by 7:30 PM but we found a place to grab some burgers (veggie burger for me).
We got back to our AirBnB and enjoyed some adult beverages. I ended up drinking about half my bottle of wine and thought I’d be fine the next morning.
Oops.
We stayed up until around 12:30 AM, three hours past my normal bedtime. We woke up around 7:00 AM, and it was very slow-going for the rest of the day. This is why I don’t drink. I get hangovers too easily. I think Kelly and Brittney had a bit of a hangover too, so I had company at least.
We headed out of town, down Mainstreet. We had a long stretch of road until it turned to gravel. I didn’t realize how much washboard we’d have to ride, but boy howdy, was there a ton of washboard. I also realized that my bike is unfit for what I want to do. It was fine as a commuter bike but for long gravel rides, it is not.
This was about 10 miles into our ride. The roads were relatively quiet and the washboard was hard to avoid. I had a song stuck in my head, “Roses” by SAINt Jhn, remixed by Imanbek and played it for Brittney and Kelly.
This was nearly our turnaround point. Kelly added an additional six miles or so for Brittney and me to get extra climbing. Little did we know what kind of climbing we were in for. As we left Kelly at the juncture, Brittney and I pedaled up the road until we came to a jeep road.
As we descended down an uneven trail, my hands ached from having to squeeze my brakes so hard for them to sort of slow me down. Behind us, a truck adjusted its suspension in order to follow down this path.
We made it a quarter of a mile down until we decided to turn back. It was probably a 10% grade (at least that’s what it felt like) and we still had more descending. I also didn’t feel comfortable letting Kelly ride by herself on country roads in the middle of nowhere.
We both ran out of gears as soon as we turned around.
We rode for maybe an hour before we finally found Kelly. At first, we were worried she decided to ride up the road we initially turned off from. So we didn’t know if we were behind or in front of her. Finally, we saw her standing on the side of the road stretching in the shade.
Brittney wanted a picture of her bike standing and with the road’s conditions, it took both Brittney and Kelly a minute to get it to stand still. I watched them from a distance and took a photo instead.
At one point, we got lost. And when I say “we got lost,” what I mean is that the road just ended. We had to duck around barbed wire, hike through cactus, and quietly find the road again.
I didn’t get a picture but there was a herd of cows and as we approached them, they all stopped and stared at us, even the ones with the horns. Brittney and I immediately freaked out. We stopped and also stared. I was waiting for them to attack. Maybe it’s too many horror movies I watch or it’s because the closest animal I get to is my cat at my mother’s house.
Klaus is fat but he’s not the size of a cow and maybe that’s what scared me.
We had to pedal past them. Kelly kept telling us they’re just curious because they probably don’t see cyclists all that often. I let Kelly take the lead. I kept looking behind us to make sure they weren’t charging after us.
After the cows, Kelly decided to take a shortcut back to our Airbnb and Brittney and I continued on to the lake.
At this point, my watch and glove created a nice blister on my wrist that was incredibly distracting on the gravel roads. I finally had to shove the watch in my jersey pocket.
We rode around the lake but never got close enough to get to the shore. We were also too tired to explore the area to find a way to touch the water. For it only being 45 miles, it felt much longer. It’s likely the last time I rode my “gravel” bike was the pedal 50 last year in October.
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