I honestly wasn’t sure I could do RVA → Denver in two days. 1600(ish) miles is no joke, especially when punching through a hurricane in the middle of Indiana. (How does that even happen?) Day 2 was a little harder: the wind protection on the AT is not great (it’s more dirt bike than continental tourer), and frankly I was kind of tired from yesterday. Plus all of Kansas was a crosswind. But 14 hours and 850mi after leaving an anonymous St Louis suburb/business park I’m drinking beer in an anonymous strip mall bar in a Denver ‘burb. This part of the trip wasn’t about getting to know the local flora and fauna, it was about getting through the middle of the country to the “good stuff”.
I’d intended to get a photo of every state line, but several of them are inconveniently located on bridges, and then I blew past the Colorado one (ostensibly the most important one). So you get windmills, a motorcycle in a field, and a Mountain Dew sign.
Tomorrow the AT gets some new (V-rated) boots and I’ll figure out my next stop, but bike service will eat up most of the day, so I’ll probably not get very far.
