I was on the road by eight and feeling good about it.

Right out of town was this cemetery. All the cemeteries around here-abouts (meaning, the wild west) have colored flowers on the graves. Of course, they are not real. You could not get a real flower like these within miles and miles and miles of here.

And lots of  cut steel metal art, For signage. It survives the elements. The sun and wind are tough enough, The winter seems like it would be tougher .

 And nothing but land for miles

  

Miles and miles and miles of beauty.

After 28 miles of all this earhly harmony and peace I got to the real town of Vernal

  

As you can see, i am nearing Dinosaur National Park. Utah is fantastic in many ways but not when it comes to highway shoulders.

Those bumps are so the 18 wheelers dont fall asleep. God bless those guys. All of them gave me tons of room. There is not a lot of oncoming or any huge amount of traffic on 40.

There is however a ton of roadkill in Utah: deer rabbitts skunks racoon big snakes and things I can’t identify. I don’t really get why they are on the side of the road. They get killed in the middle of the road, dont they? What do they do? With their last breath do they scrurry to the side of the road, or what?

In Vernal I bought lots of food to carry because I knew there would be no real food for the next 90 miles. I met the man who makes the sushi in the grocery store there. He was proud of it and happy I liked it. Asian fellow. Not a lot of Asians around here. Nice guy. Great sushi.

  
There were no towns between Vernal UT  and Dinosaur CO but there was evidence of more happening times in these remote areas

As I rode the sky got darker and darker and I could see storms happening on either side of me.

 I was afraid of the lightening. It seemed like I was the tallest thing on the horizon for as far as the eye could see.

I got rained on a bit but not much. I found out later that storms were so bad near Vernal that there was 3″ of hail on the road! Hail is hard to imagine because its way hot here and I havent had any, I mean NONE, shade thus entire trip.

I finally made it to Colorado

For some reason I thought Colorado was going to be enlightened in some way. Not so.

I was shocked when I got to Dinosaur.

It was a third world dump.

  
What hotels had been there were not anymore open. They were abandoned.  So I had to set up in the town park because there were no campgrounds. I booked a hotel that I was told was in Dinosaur but it was actually in Rangely which is 18 miles away. In a car 18 miles doesn’t seem like much. When I booked the room I asked them if they were on Highway 40 and they said they were but in fact they are on the intersecting Highway 134 so I was very bummed when I got done with my 64 miles and there was no hotel and a dump of a town (which was really just an intersection)  but it turned out that the city park was quite nice.

There were very clean free showers which people come from close to 100 miles around to use! Especially in hunting season and horse competition season. Quite a few people were using them now because the hang glider contest was in the area. Still, it wasn’t quite the rest I wanted after 64 miles of biking.

 This guy was my neighbor

That store is on the corner of highway 40 and Colorado 134 so it’s open 24 hours and most of the 18 wheelers turn off here. I didn’t get  much sleep but the coffee Here will be trucker real like really strong coffee.

Before the gas station is a place called “the depot” and the lady in there makes homemade ice cream so I had a chocolate milkshake that was one of the best in the entire world.

She had tons of Christian stuff in her place and a bunch of dinosaur stuff and books on the subject of evolution and she wasn’t nice. The word BELIEVE was prominently posted everywhere.

The word “believe” is a bit more understandable what they mean (in Jesus) than when you see hear the word “freedom” tossed around everywhere but still…what are these people talking about really? I see signs like “Freedom, thank a veteran”  I’m like uhhh, I just don’t It.

After the ice cream store I went to the liquor store because I wanted to buy a glass of wine and the lady in there was super nice and she had this beautiful moon necklace on and we chatted it up. For some reason, I told her about the unfriendly Christian lady.

She was all anout the unfriendly Christians in town and told the story about her adopted father who had been the town pastor for decades and how they meanly kicked him out overnight when he started to have dementia.

I ask her about her moon necklace and she tells me that she’s pagan; wiccan specifically. I tell her about my friends and I doing equinox and solstice rituals and how I was at a stonehenge in Avebury England on this summer solstice.

I tell her about my friend’s Facebook group called “One o’clock on the dot coven of  irreverent witchy business”. She then tells me that she is a for real witch from generations of witches and was in fact born with a veil. I don’t even know what that means.

She asks me where I’m staying and I tell her I’m staying in the town park and she expresses concern because she’s afraid there’s going to be a huge storm coming through and tells me I have no idea what kind of storms come through there.

She suggests I stay in her backyard or in her grandmother’s backyard and I thank her but I tell her I’m already all set up and I think I’m OK.

She writes down me her name and her phone number and gives it to me and makes me promise to call her if  “The Storm” comes in and she says she will drive by and pick me up right away!  Wow.

I try to drink the wine but I’m afraid it will keep me up so I don’t. I end up staying awake most of the night anyhow listening to the trucks.