Glacier - Day 8

Buffalo, WY to Colorado Springs, CO: about 460 miles

In talking with the Hotel manager the night before we understood that it might be a little chilly in the morning. We awoke to cold temps and a few sprinkles. A cold front had pushed through, overnight and robbed us of the warm weather we had been experiencing. Must have been in the mid 40s; slightly colder than I had anticipated. We walked down to McDonalds and grabbed a quick breakfast, but more importantly, some coffee to get us warmed up and ready to tackle the road.
When we returned to the hotel, another one of the bikers was up and preparing to head north to Idaho. I did not envy him. He just purchased a Harley in Colorado and was taking it home. He didn’t quite have the right gear, but I loaned him some electrical tape so he could tape down his North Face rain paints to his boots to try to keep some of the weather out. I was really glad we were headed south as that pass had to be much colder than where we were headed.

We packed the bikes and layered on our cold weather gear in preparation for the super-slab slide down to Colorado Springs. I told Kevin to dress warm, not scary… he didn’t seem to think there was a difference.

It was good to have all the gear on as it did not want to warm up. We hit the highway and locked the throttles in about 85 MPH, that certainly warmed us up, not. We stopped down the road and had our first fill up of the day. These are a couple of pics I snapped at the gas station.

I then handed the camera to Kevin so he could take a picture of me in my cold weather gear. Here’s the shot he got. Seems I did not pull the zoom back out... and neither did he.

It was so cold I had frost build up on my mustache... oh no, that's just age showing through.

After that we mounted and pointed our bikes south on I25 in hopes of overtaking the cold front. That would allow us to lose some of this gear.

On some roads you’ve traveled, there’s no question why it’s there and what it’s used for. You can clearly see the need for such roads. This did not appear to be one of those roads. Incredibly lonely with hardly any traffic, with absolutely nothing between points A and B.

I think these are pictures are as we headed into Casper, WY. Still very overcast with low hanging clouds and low temps.

I don’t have too many pictures after that… we really wanted to overtake the cold front that snuck by us during the night, so we were pretty focused on getting down the road. We did not overtake the front until we reach Fort Collins at around 3 that afternon, where the temperature was a toasty 77º. That’s when we decided to lose some of the gear, grab some lunch at Arby’s, call our significant others and rest a bit.

I pushed the Valk to 167 miles before the fill up. Quite proud of that as we were doing 80-85 on the highway. Kevin just shrugged his shoulders as he put in his usual 2.5 gallons as I pumped in over 4.

After that we headed straight into Denver, where I thought the traffic was heavy, but Kevin called it light. We made it to Kevin’s house on the southern tip of Colorado Springs about 5:30PM. Only 8 ½ hours on the road, pretty short day for us.

We unloaded some, but more importantly we pulled out our memory cards and relived the trip as we watched the slideshow of all our pictures on his computer. Over 855 pictures between two cameras; aren’t you glad we didn’t put them all in the report. Of course, some of them weren’t any good, so we really had only about 850 worthy shots.

We left the bikes in the driveway overnight and headed to bed somewhat early as I had about 750 miles to cover the next day to make it back home.