As we ate breakfast in the motel parking lot in Columbus, the skies looked very threatening. I was sure we'd get nice and wet before the morning's end. Our route was primarily south today, and we could see rain showers across the entire horizon looking in this direction.

In the end, we got very lucky. There were times when we rode on rain-soaked roads and other times when you could smell the rain in the air, but we only felt very light sprinkles as we pulled out of the second rest stop and again as we pulled into lunch. Just as we left lunch at the Wyoming border, the sun came out and the temperatures went up.

Yes, we crossed into another state today. After five days of riding through Montana, we're now in Wyoming for a few. It was startling to see the change in terrain, almost right at the border. While the part of Montana that we rode through was green and lush, Wyoming was largely dry with scrub plants.

Today was billed as a day with 3100 ft of elevation gain. Over 115 miles, this is a relatively flat route. But the route sheet we got indicated 6200 ft.  It turned out that today's

The scenery in the morning was breathtaking. The overcast skies made the green hillsides look even lusher and made the skies over the nearby mountains more dramatic. But all morning, we watched the rain storms along the horizon and waited to put on our rain jackets. I took more photos today than any day on the trip so far. One of these days, I'll have to come back to this area with all my photography gear

The rusted metal roof on this barn was a dramatic contrast to the lush greenery surrounding it

and do some more serious photography. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of the photos I took with my little digital point and shoot.

To go with all the climbing today, we had some great descents - the tandems were able to get up to 60 mph. I reached just over 50 and could have probably

We're now in Wyoming

After lunch, we picked up a bit of a headwind and had a long hard ride along an incredibly straight section of highway to our last rest stop. It seemed to go on forever as there was nothing interesting along the road to differentiate one section from the next. Everyone was checking to see if they had a flat tire or a rubbing brake because progress seemed to go so slow on what appeared to be a flat level rode. In reality, we were gaining a fair amount of elevation.

After the final stop, we had a long gradual climb up another 1000 feet and then a nice descent into Cody. The descent would have been even nicer if we hadn't had a strong headwind limiting our top speed.

Tomorrow is going to be a long tough day. We're doing 150 miles with 7300 feet of elevation gain, and a good chunk of this will be in a single climb up the Bighorn mountains. It's billed as a 4 hour climb over 30 miles. We're going to start the ride tomorrow at 6:00AM to try to give everyone enough time to complete the day, but I'm sure there will be riders that arrive to the motel tomorrow pretty late.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer article I mentioned yesterday did get published. You can read it online here. One error in the article I should mention is that Karl and Anne Marie have known each other for many years.

If you're also following Doug's website, his computer had a problem yesterday and he hasn't been able to make any updates. He's having a new computer shipped to him so he'll be back on line in a couple days.