Day 18 (Monday 11-7-2011): Route 26 rest stop to Riverton Motel 6

...and I'm back.  I feel bad for taking so long to post the rest of these blog entries but it wasn't really on the top of my list of things to do when I got back and without a reliable internet connection (I'm using a 'free' internet connection from a neighbor that cuts out quite frequently), it makes it a bit hard to view my routes on Strava and Google Maps online while cross-referencing to my photos to see exactly where I went that day and on what roads, through what towns, and passing by which notable locations.  I figured I'd take advantage of some free time (even though it's 55 degrees outside and I should be getting some riding in now instead of later this evening in the dark) to knock out a post or two.  I was discussing my trip with some friends last night at a birthday party so that sort of inspired me to get online and start writing the last nine days worth of posts chronicling my journey.  My recollections of the day's events might be somewhat hazy (another reason why I should have done this earlier and why relying on a laptop that could only be used for a few hours without an electrical socket on the trip wasn't exactly ideal for updating daily) but hopefully with pictures and a route I should be able to reconstruct the day's ride and activities pretty well.  I guess we will find out shortly...

Not an unusual population for Wyoming

The (clean) family restroom

Anyways, onto day 18.  I awoke somewhat late in my makeshift 'hotel room' inside the highway rest stop family restroom (no sunlight to wake me up!), made breakfast, packed up my stuff, and returned the sink and shroud to it's original condition before heading out on Route 26, a fairly low traffic state highway that I would probably be on for a few days. Nothing spectacular on the route in the morning but I did pass through a few small towns with populations under 50. One that showed up on my Garmin base map was just one building that looked like it hadn't been occupied in a decade.

One of the 'towns' I biked through

As I rolled through Riverton, WY (a fairly large city with a University of Wyoming campus) I decided to stop at a McDonalds to access the internet and grab something to eat.  I had planned to continue riding after a brief stop so I downed two McRib sandwhiches, a large order of fries, and 2 apple pies that I consumed with a caramel sundae (apple pie a la mode!)  I also took advantage of free refills to stock up on soda to drink while riding to take a break from water and reduce the amount of solid food calories that I'd have to take on while riding hours each day.

In the end however I spent way longer than I thought at the McDonalds online (until my battery was about to die around three and a half hours later!) so instead of biking just an hour before darkness set in, I decided to stay in Riverton at a Motel 6.  So much for taking on a bunch of food and energy to get me through riding more in the afternoon!  However, I didn't need to eat dinner that night due to my large lunch Only 38.5 miles for the day - somewhat disappointing but no real rush as I had already decided at that point that I wasn't going to make it back to Philly by bike and was going to take some sort of transportation. 

Well that wasn't too bad - I remembered what happened that day (not much) without too much difficulty! Also, I found out that the Spot Messenger service that I was linking to on Facebook only stores a week worth of posts so I'm going to go back and upload all my GPS routes onto each day's posts.  You'll get a good idea of the roundabout way I took to get out of Seattle my first couple days!  Here's today's route:

http://app.strava.com/rides/2253182

In addition, I just discovered that on Blogger you can set the date and time of publishing - I can set each post to match the date that I'm writing about, or I can just leave it be and have it set as the day I actually submit it.  The order that posts appear on the blog are by date - this post was actually started as a draft on the 17th of November (!) so it actually appeared behind my last post which was sort of confusing so I changed the date of the publishing to today so it went to the front of the blog.  Also, should I delete my last post now that I'm posting again?  It's not really sharing anything relevant about the journey that won't get discussed later.