The next morning we woke up and most of the other bikers were already gone or much further into packing up than us.... It was cold but not nearly as cold as it would be when we started biking about an hour after we woke up and did our morning chores and stocked up on a few snacks from the lodge. We started pedaling on a dirt road outside of the lodge and the rolling dirt hills continued for a while while the temperature dropped. We passed cow fields and ranches and the sprinklers turned on to water the grass froze in wide circles on the ground, spraying ice around us. We stopped to put on more clothes and we were finally putting to use the entirety of our wardrobe from long wool pants to mittens and hats. We struggled along for a while and were getting quite cold when we finally passed through a tiny rock canyon-like outcropping and then popped out on a small highway in Wyoming!

It was still cold and soon our climb started at the same time as a flurry of snow. We were chilly but now the novelty of biking in the snow was warming us up along with the climb and we soon shedded layers. The highway continued up into the hills and twisted around for a while before we descended and then turned on a razor straight gravel road. After it warmed up again and we were back to our normal biking outfits, the gravel road started winding up again and we climbed for a while on a very quiet forest road. We eventually topped out and found some more asphalt and had some Scandinavian swimmers while sitting in the middle of the road as we could see for miles around. The road was very straight but went up and down for a while before merging with another straight highway with more traffic. We were now cowering whenever a truck would approach from behind because the massive semis did not give us much space and the shoulder was rather small. We fought headwinds and dealt with annoying trucks for about 10 slow miles, during which I lost Ziven for a bit and had to wait for him to catch up. We could barely hear our audiobooks or music over the din from the road and the wind but we eventually came to a T in the road and went under I80 and emerged on the tiny mainstream of Rawlings, Wyoming.

We had heard of a Thai restaurant and were eager for real food that resembled what we could find in Berkeley so we immediately went to the restaurant. Ziven had chicken and I had Pad See Ew which definitely didn’t compare to its California counterpart, mainly due to the fact that they used linguini pasta instead of rice noodles, but the food was good for our chilled souls. We then figured out our accommodation and moseyed along the Main Street to the cheapest hotel we could find - a luxurious Days Inn. After showering and hauling our bikes up the stairs, we walked along the road for about a quarter mile to Walmart and restocked for our next leg of the journey through the Great Basin - a literal desert as well as a food desert. We bought noodles and tried to find some fruits and vegetables that would pack well and then got caught up in the dessert section going overboard with brownies, cookie dough bites, and ice cream. We headed back to the hotel and watched some TV and hung out eating almost all our desserts before calling it a day and drifting off to sleep in our cozy bed.