After Middlegate, we had pretty much no choice where to stop for the next three destinations. The towns were spaced out by 60-80 miles with no food or water available in between. Each day had 2 or 3 mountain passes that would descend into a new valley.
After our 114 mile day, we slept in a bit and had a long breakfast at the Middlegate restaurant. We took inventory on our food and did some mechanical checkups. We realized we had close to 50 pounds of food that we had stockpiled for the desert. We decided we would be better off eating some of this and reducing our weight than eating at a restaurant.
On the day out of Middlegate we met our first two other touring cyclists. They were both traveling in the opposite direction. The first was a a 65-75 year old Serbian man who was 75 days into his journey. It was his first time in the US and he had started in Florida and was on the way up to Alaska. He suggested cycling as a good way to keep your knees healthy. The next cyclist was a girl about 5 years older than us who was on her way to Oregon for the start of the TransAmerica race. She was doing this tour to train for it. She had tried the race before but had to pull out due to injury. She was hoping to make it across the country in about 3 weeks during the race.
Because we could see so far in the valleys, we could see where all of the rain was. There was rain forecasted every day of the trip but we managed to only get sprinkled on a few times.
The first night was spent in Austin. We went through it very quickly and realized the only grocery stores were also gas stations and closed at 8pm. Fortunately, we had way too much of our own food to eat. We made our way to the city park which was very well kept up and was open for camping for bikers. We had been warned by the Serbian man that the sprinklers turned on at 4:30am so we took care to watch out for them.
We got up the next morning to get to Eureka. It was very similar to the previous day with huge valleys followed by big climbs and descents. The road stretched on for as far as you could see sometimes. It was also hard to tell if the road was going up or down sometimes. We would ride for a while feeling like we had a flat or the brakes were on and then would turn around and realize that it was all uphill.
The next night we stayed in Eureka. We rolled into town in the evening as it started raining. We found a diner and ordered two pizzas. The waitress was surprised that we were getting two because one was supposedly good for three people. We of course had to finish both of them because of that. While at the restaurant; we met a couple who used to live near Harrisonburg. They offered us showers in the morning. We were happy to accept because we hadn’t had one since Monday night (and it was Sunday morning). We camped in the city park and then went to their home where they provided us with showers and surprised us with a big breakfast too. We were very greatful for that because we were planning on eating a cold bagel with peanut butter.
The breakfast powered us on to Ely where we had decided to take a rest day after a tough few days. This last day was the hardest because it had 4 different peaks but after the last one we had a nice 1500 foot descent into the town. There was lots of rain visible around us but it all blew off th road before we got there.
We tried camping in the city park again but were told we couldn’t. We called an RV Park and the response to “could we set up tents in an RV site was?” was “no we don’t do that.” The only other option was a KOA 2 miles outside of town. We decided we had no choice but to pay for a tent site there. They at least had laundry which was desperately needed. We stopped and got a rotisserie chicken and a day old dozen donuts for dinner at the grocery store and then ventured out in the dark and rain to the KOA. It was not the happiest part of the trip but we were excited for a rest day the next day.
On our rest day we did laundry for the first time in a week at the KOA and then went back into town for some errands. We found a church that was willing to host us and then ate at a Chinese buffet a few blocks away. We spent the rest of our time relaxing in the church and visiting the local outdoors store to get more supplies and fix some small issues that had come up over the previous 300 miles of riding.