Day 41 Week 6, 30 May 2025

Rest day!! What a great place to spend a day off- Fort Collins, home of the Colorado State University. We stayed at a Best Western, just a mile south of the Old Town area. Eminently walkable town with lots of restaurants, microbreweries, shops. A beautiful sunny day in the high 60s. I took care of a lot of stuff today- took my bike to the Trek bike shop for a thorough look over. They replaced the rear tire with a Schwalbe Marathon plus, replaced the chain and rear brake pads, replaced some frayed cables and did a complete cleaning. I got a new pair of SPD bike shoes that give much more room for my toes. I returned my old leaking sleeping pad at REI and got a full refund. I uploaded all my blog stuff using the hotel wireless and took care of all my financial business. Then I went downtown to the Art museum. They were having an exposition on masks, and they were all for sale through an online auction, to benefit the Fort Collins Modern Art Museum. I actually bid on a couple- one is a dung beetle and another is a face with honeybees on it. Not sure that my wife will approve, in which case if I get one of these they may have to hang in my office. But it will be for a good cause! I went to the Discovery Museum further North from old town- it was mainly for kids, but I learned some interesting things. One is that Fort Collins was a major center for Sugar Beet production back in the 1800s. There was a huge factory here. Nothing is left of the original fort that was built here in the early 1800s, but they have some small houses that were built around that time. They were moved to Library Park and you can see them there. Log cabins basically with mortar filling the cracks- rustic to say the least. I had a great lunch at a cafe on College Ave called Austin’s, then went to pick up my bike at Treks, rode it back to the hotel, took a dip in the hotel pool and hot tub prior to going for a massage at the Living Arts Massage and Wellness Center in Old Town. Matthew gave me a great deep tissue massage for an hour, from 5-6 PM. Felt great!!! Actually the riding has not given me any issues- my back, legs, shoulders all feel fine although there is some soreness in my quads. My butt gets some soreness after 40 miles or so, but getting off the bike for 10 minutes resolves that. In any case, the massage felt tremendous, and after 2000 miles of riding, I think I deserved it! Haha…

After the massage, I met up with Terence, Theo, Mel, Chet and Than at Lucky Joe’s Irish pub in Old Town, for fish and chips and some really good draft IPA- a local brewery: Odell Brewing Mountain Standard IPA. Slept like a baby!! Adventure Cycling planned this really well- a great rest stop prior to climbing into the Rockies tomorrow!