June 14 … finally on the road. The week leading up to this day has been really tough — so much to get done, at work, at home, getting everything ready. All the packing, including Carol cleaning and breaking down the bikes to pack in their travel boxes. Trying to get the yard watered, mowed, weeded, writing all the great long complicated instructions for the house sitter. Yikes. I don’t think I was this nervous before our wedding ceremony last summer!
So it was almost a relief when the alarm went off at 4:30; we could get in the truck and point ourselves up into the hills. We got to Breckenridge around 9:00, unloaded the bike boxes onto the transport semi, and got ourselves loaded onto the second bus leaving for Durango.
Ride the Rockies transport semi
Coach USA bus to Durango
It was a long ride and we didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon. Along the way I watched the scenery out the window, snoozed a little, read the Velo News Tour de France special issue, chatted with some folks sitting next to us. I tried not to notice the road too much; the first part of the trip, from Breck to Buena Vista, we’d be re-tracing in a week, only this time on our bikes — and I really didn’t want to see how steep it was.
We all rolled off the bus at Durango High School to a scene of hundreds of people, bags, bikes everywhere. Carol and I took turns getting our registration packets while the other waited in the shade with the duffel bags; the whole process was amazingly organized and streamlined. We each got our numbered wristband, matching numbered sticker for our bike, route and profile map book, jersey, and general instructions. After registering, our next (very important!) stop was to sign up for massages for later in the week — per our RTR veteran Jill’s very good advice. We figured massages after day 2 and on our rest day in Crested Butte would be well-timed.
Registering at Ride the Rockies
The beastly duffels
Not too long after, the semi with all our bikes arrived. A massive bucket brigade formed up behind the truck and people started passing boxes along down to the parking lot. We found our boxes and got the bikes put back together again in about 20 minutes; then we wheeled them down to the “lock up” on the Durango High School tennis courts.
All that was left now was to get our bags squared away for the trip to the hotel. We hauled two big duffels with us: one packed with our camping gear (tent, pads, sleeping bags, pillows, chairs) and one with all our clothes. They were both beasts. We left the camping gear duffel on the baggage truck, and hauled the other duffel with us to the shuttle bus.
During the week, at each host town, a cadre of big Coach USA tour buses served as a shuttle service taking people from the day’s staging area to the local hotels, community events, beer garden, and so forth. The trick was finding the right bus going to the right place, and making sure the driver understood where you wanted to go. We got ourselves and our bag onto a bus for the drive to the Durango Lodge, but ended up getting dropped off about five blocks away — a very long way to carry a 60-pound duffel bag at the end of a long day.
But we got there, got ourselves settled, showered, and walked back downtown to find the beer garden and dinner. The host community for each day’s ride had dinner and entertainment arranged for us, and of course, our very good friends from New Belgium Brewery, right here in Fort Collins, is a major sponsor of RTR, and looking forward to that cold Fat Tire at the end of the day was a major incentive to get the miles under my tires! In the smaller towns, like Montrose and Buena Vista, a single community organization like the Optimists would put on a dinner; in places like Durango and Telluride, several local vendors were out selling burgers, brats, and so on.
But it had been a long day and we called it quits pretty early, and after a brief visit to the Durango-Silverton narrow gauge railroad depot we went back to our room, got our gear sorted out for the morning, and hit the sack — alarm set for 5:00. This was NOT a vacation to sleep in!
