{"id":515,"date":"2016-07-08T04:11:24","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T04:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=515"},"modified":"2017-04-25T15:07:56","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T15:07:56","slug":"god-provides-rides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/07\/08\/god-provides-rides\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, July 8 God Provides Rides"},"content":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 <\/strong>This morning we did a lot of eating\u2014two breakfasts\u2014one at the motel, the other at a restaurant. Then came the hurry of doing all the rest of our town chores, and loading packs. For lunch, we went to the awesome Lyon’s Soda Fountain and each had a giant banana split. The customers could not believe we could eat so much! Then we tried hitchhiking.<\/p>\n

I made a sign, “CDT Hiker to Rabbit Ears Pass” but no luck. So we took the free bus to the end of the line and tried again. In only a few minutes, a girl stopped and offered to drive us 4 miles. Sure! That’s progress. And then, where she had to drop us off, there was a big huge truck parked by the road. The driver said “Sure\u2014I can drive you to the pass.” So God provided us with a way back to the CDT\u2014we are very grateful!<\/p>\n

DETAILS:\u00a0 <\/strong>I am so used to being up at 5:20 that I just could not sleep in any later than 6:20.\u00a0 So I got up then, sorted through all our food and made a shopping list.\u00a0 I am still worried about trail conditions, so I plan to bring an extra day’s worth of food, more than we’d originally planned for.\u00a0 Then it was off to the continental breakfast at the motel, where Fixit and I scarfed up some of everything they had, while somewhat cringing at the TV news that was blaring in the background.\u00a0 Man, are we glad to be out in the wilderness this summer–I would hate having to deal with all the presidential primary wrangling every single day.<\/p>\n

After that breakfast, we walked down the street to Winona’s restaurant for a SECOND breakfast.\u00a0 It was already a warm day, and we were able to sit outside.\u00a0 Steamboat Springs is a very touristy town, and most of the prices reflect that, but Winona’s was much more reasonable.\u00a0 The food was good, too!<\/p>\n

Then it was time to go grocery shopping.\u00a0 Besides an extra day of food, I also got a marker pen to make a sign that may help us hitch back to the CDT.\u00a0 We’ve heard it can be difficult, so a sign might help.\u00a0 I loaded up the food bags with SIX days worth of eatables.\u00a0 Heeeeeeavy!\u00a0 Groan.\u00a0 But I don’t want to run out again.\u00a0 By then it was 11:00 am and we had to be out of our room, so we moved to the “breakfast room” at the motel, where I finished writing this journal (so I could mail it home), plus wrote out more little cards for Fixit to hand out (they have our website and info) and made a cardboard sign that said, “CDT HIKERS to RABBIT EARS PASS”.<\/p>\n

Then we took our packs and “hiked” back down the main street again to Lyon’s Drug Store, to get their famous banana splits.\u00a0 When the other customers heard us each ordering a split, they said, “You’d do better if you just get ONE, then divide it.”\u00a0 Hah!\u00a0 They don’t know how much thruhikers can eat!\u00a0\u00a0 While we waited, we watched the girl who was running the soda fountain.\u00a0 She was amazing–lightning fast, yet cheerful and friendly.\u00a0 She has multi-tasking down to a science!\u00a0 She handed us our banana splits, and they were HUGE!\u00a0\u00a0 No problem, though–we ate every last bit, to the amazement of the other customers.<\/p>\n

Then it was time to walk out to the “end” of town and try to hitch hike.\u00a0 Along the way, I stopped at a gas station to get a map of Wyoming (just in case we need to bail off the trail) and also a bunch of candy bars.\u00a0 The Natural Grocery store where I got our other food does NOT have candy!\u00a0\u00a0 We tried and tried to hitch a ride, for some time, but no luck at all, so we decided to take the free shuttle bus out to the very end of town and try again there.\u00a0 And on the bus–surprise!\u00a0 We met Eric the Red!\u00a0 He did not look well, and told us he’d been very sick with giardia, so sick that he could not hike.\u00a0 He’s been staying in Steamboat Springs trying to recover enough to return to the trail.\u00a0 We felt so bad for him–he made a lot of sacrifices in order to do the CDT this summer.\u00a0 He got off before we did, and we sadly watched him walk away.\u00a0 I thought, “Oh Lord, that could have been us.\u00a0 Thank you for helping us stay well.\u00a0 Thank you for Aqua Mira.”<\/p>\n

The end of the bus line really was at the very edge of “civilization”, and again we held out our sign and our thumbs.\u00a0 Many cars went by, but then one finally stopped.\u00a0 It was a sweet young girl who was actually in the process of moving, so her car was full of boxes and stuff.\u00a0 She said, “If you can fit yourselves in, I can give you a ride for 4 miles…that’s where I turn off the highway.”\u00a0 Well, we figured, “Hey, that’s progress!\u00a0 We’ll go for it!” and squeezed ourselves in with her.\u00a0 She dropped us off at a wide pullout space down the highway, where two big trucks were already parked.\u00a0\u00a0 I immediately decided to beg for a ride.\u00a0 The driver of truck #1 said, “Well, normally I don’t pick up hitch hikers, but you guys look OK.\u00a0 Right now, I’m having AC problems with the truck, and it’s getting looked at.\u00a0 So if you don’t mind waiting a bit…..”\u00a0\u00a0 Hey, we did NOT mind!<\/p>\n

Less than an hour later we were on our way.\u00a0 Turned out that the truck was hauling the stuff that comes out of the ground when they are digging an oil well.\u00a0 It’s sort of a mix of sand\/dirt\/oil, and it has to go to a special landfill so it doesn’t pollute everything.\u00a0 The driver said he used to be building houses back in Georgia, but the market dried up and he got this job driving a truck for the oil company.\u00a0 He told us that a lot of the ranches around here have oil wells (yes, we had noticed that!) and that many ranchers are getting $1,000 a DAY from their oil income.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 No wonder the ranch houses and equipment look so nice.\u00a0 Interesting that they are still RANCHING and not just sitting around enjoying their oil income.\u00a0 He said, “Yeah, they are drilling more oil wells every day.\u00a0 There’s a lot of oil here.”<\/p>\n

He kindly dropped us off at the road to the campground, and soon we were back on the CDT!\u00a0 Hooray!\u00a0 It was a lovely, warm late afternoon by then, with big puffy clouds in the sky, green meadows filled with wildflowers, happy little creeks, some lakes and a very nice trail to follow.\u00a0 (Only a very few blowdowns to negotiate).\u00a0 Then we met our first CDT SOBO–he told us he had skipped Wyoming, in order to go through Colorado in the summer.\u00a0 He plans to go back later and finish up.<\/p>\n

We ended up camping by Fishook Lake, after doing 5 1\/2 miles, which isn’t much, but we didn’t start till way late.\u00a0 We are really grateful to the Lord for helping us with rides today!\u00a0 All the CDT hikers dislike the hitch out of Steamboat Springs, but it all worked out fine for us!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 This morning we did a lot of eating\u2014two breakfasts\u2014one at the motel, the other at a restaurant. Then came the hurry of doing all the rest of our town chores, and loading packs. For lunch, we went to the awesome Lyon’s Soda Fountain and each had a giant banana split. The customers could not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colorado"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}