TravellingStrom

Saturday – Cortez, Colorado

Well, I had a bit of a late start, maybe due to the beer last night, lol. But, after thinking about which way to go, I finally decided to go do the Four Corners monument, so first off I head out of Page, via a power station. Now, for some reason I thought this was gas fired, but the crap in the smoke made me change my mind to probably coal, then on the other side I saw the coal piles and the rail line in. Surely they could clean that up, or this place will turn into LA!

After that the road was quite nice and some nice cliffs and outcrops etc as well.

Hey, my first 10k on the bike, but not the last 🙂 Well, OK, I did not do all of it.

Those spires are to the north of me and in another national park, but not this time.

I was looking for some shade about now as I had food with me, and it was hot, but this land is tree free 😦

But, about 10 minutes later when I got to the cliffs in the above photo, I found an excellent place, not much of it, but it did me 🙂 I have no idea what this building was, maybe a communal centre or something, but it has not been used for a long time. The place was called Baby Rock and had some nice rock formations in the cliffs.

I am now heading west with more of the same flat horizon occasionally broken by a flat topped mesa.

At half two I get to a place called Four Corners, this is where 4 states meet and the only place it does so, although if you google the name, it comes up with a town near Rapid City, so use Four Corners, Arizona as the search item 🙂 It is on Navajo land and so you have to pay $3 to get in and take some photos of the marker, there are also lots of little market shops where you can buy Indian goods.

And because it is on a junction, I collected two more welcome signs, excuse the flash of belly in the 2nd one, I will try and keep it clean from now on 🙂

A bit more flat land as I continue on. I had spoken to a couple of Harley chaps at the monument and they recommended the 160 north to Cortez, which was what I was planning on doing, they also mentioned another road south to Albuquerque, so I would look into that as well. The road got higher as I got closer to Cortez and the landscape changed accordingly.

Once there I decided to find a motel which I did on the outskirts of a large town. While doing a blog thing a chap came over and checked out my bike, Marty or Monty, something like that, but he thought he had seen me come down a local mountain, nope, not me another strommer. He advised me on two roads to try, one being the Mesa Verde (meesa verday) National Park which has some great winding roads, so I thought I could do that in the morning and also a smallish nice road that heads west, so maybe that one also.

After a few hours and a nuked meal and a phone call to mum as it was Mothers Day right now in OZ, I wandered across the road where there happened to be a bar, but it was shut, useless!

So, I had no other option, if I did not want to walk a mile to town, but to go to the Mexican place next to the motel, where I had a few beers while chatting with Raul, they give you corn chips and salsa while you are there, so I had snacks all night long. Well not that long because I found out I got ripped off an hour due to a different time zone, so it was later than I thought 🙂 Tonight I tried the Tecate beer, it was OK, but a bit weak I felt.

I got to bed early or late, depends on which clock I looked at!

Day – 226 miles and 364 km
Trip – 7,065 miles and 11,370 km

Cheers
TravellingStrom
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