The MisterEd 8000; Grande Tour of America

Day of Thunder

Today was a riding day.  Didn't take too many pictures at all.  The morning started in Laramie at, of all places, a Starbucks!  I can always tell when I'm getting closer to home when the Starbucks signs start showing up again.  This one was inside the Safeway supermarket, but that's OK - it's Laramie.

I was on the road at 7:15 AM and it was a bit on the chilly side.  I had heavy gloves, sweatshirt and neck warmer on up until Rawlins where I made my first gas stop of the day.  By then, the temp had gone from a chilly 40 ish to a more managable 50-55 and getting warmer.  By the time I made Table Rock, the morning had warmed into the low 80's.  But the change in weather was signalled by the presence of disturbed atmosphere.  There was a pretty good northwest breeze most of the morning and a couple hours after lunch, I started running in to high, building thunderclouds.


I got the rain gear back on again and pressed on toward Salt Lake City.

I ended up waiting at a rest area near Evanston, Wyoming as a nasty thunder cell passed over.  That stopped me for about 45 minutes and then I passed through the cold front that had been causing the storms almost exactly at the Utah border.

I rode around Salt Lake City in steadily clearing skies and by Ogden, it looked like this:


The day was not to remain rain free, however.  It seemed like no sooner had I packed up the rain gear again than I ran into more thunderheads near the Idaho border.



So, it was back in to the rain gear again as the sprinkles started up once more.  The sky continued to get darker and more threatening and I started hearing thunder again by the time I reached Twin Falls.  At a gas stop there, I decided that nearly 600 miles was enough and that I could make Portland the next day without any problems, so I got a room in Twin Falls for the night and watched the thunderstorms roll on through outside my window.

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