Day 4: Taking it easy

We got up late today and then made breakfast for everyone:  fried eggs with toast. Matt spent the morning finishing up processing some photographs for our posts, researching a place to stay in Moab, and planning routes for today and to Moab tomorrow. In the meantime, I did some laundry, cleaned up our visors, repacked our rain gear, and readied my tailbag for grocery shopping for this evening's dinner.

By the time we left, it was already noon. Yikes! Unfortunately, the route that we wanted to take today headed right into some "active weather": we saw very dark clouds with lightning shooting out of them as we travelled along Highway 50. Bad news. We decided not to continue on the planned route. Instead, we stopped in at Black Canyon Corner and browsed their wares for a while. We turned back into Montrose and then did some grocery shopping for tonight's dinner. While we were strolling up and down the aisles, the rain came down in buckets. By the time we finished, the rain had cleared up and we were able to return to our chalet in relatively good weather (i.e. it wasn't raining).

On our way back after grocery shopping, we saw a sign on the side of the road that read: Alpacas for sale. And yes, there was a yard full of little alpacas chasing one another and generally being troublemakers. They were quite cute.

We returned to find Jackie and Bill already back from their ride and washing their bikes. Apparently they had encountered a mudslide during their ride so both of their bikes (and their gear) were mud-splattered. We quickly unloaded our bikes, ate a quick snack, and headed out again. We thought we could try to do a section of the Million Dollar Highway again before returning for dinner. That lasted about all of 5 minutes. A few minutes after we got out onto Highway 550 from our chalet, it started pouring. We found a safe spot and turned around. Oh well. Everyone had a good laugh when we reappeared at the chalet in under 10 minutes.

Tonight's dinner will be beef fajitas with corn and tomato salsa, and a roasted tomato and goat cheese salad to start. Mmm mmm good.  

Update on Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 12:29AM by Matt

Given yesterday's events, the photo pickings were rather slim, but here's something anyways.

The storm responsible for us turning around:

Heading back from Montrose:

Dinner prep: