Grand Junction - Moab

Woke up early in the morning in Grand Junction, and started the day with a "Running & Shooting"!!

The city is very cool, with a great artistic look on the main streeth, and pretty mountains in the background, so it was really a pleasant run. I was forced to stop couple times to make sure I got a nice pic, like in the sculpture of a dinosaur riding a bike above!

Run: 10km - 45min

Breakfast in the hotel, time to relax a bit and read emails, before a quick stop to swim at Orchad Mesa Pool.

600m warm up, 3x200m drills, 200m kick, 400m pull, 10x100m @1'30" (building 1-3), 200m easy. 

Swim: 3km - 1hour
(Not to count the time in the trampolim!)

I was feeling very tired, was even thinking that Grand Junction could be like 10.000ft high, but afterwards checking in the map, I realized there was nothing wrong, just I was really smashed! Lol

Work done, time to hit the road!

We passed by Fruita, a very cute city, where we had burritos for lunch followed by a quick city tour drive.

Back to the road, for sure one of the most incredible ones we have drove. Always following the Colorado River, which carved in thousands of years, beautiful views in the mountains around. 

As fantastic, as tricky! As at one time we have decided to explore a way that says innofensively "Onion Creek". But later at Google Maps, we discover the real name of the road was "Rose Garden Hill Safari Route".

A super cool way! We drove through creeks and wear the Isuzu 4x4, it was pretty fun at the beginning but afterwards on a attempt to do the loop, we spent more than two hours, to find the way back. 

How nice it was to be in the pavement again! The Isuzu was already very colorful, from the red dust.

Past this adventure, we didn't want to explore anything anymore. Lol So we drove nonstop until Moab.

We got there before the sunset, so we decided to stretch the drive into "The Arches Nacional Park", another rocky wonder.

From the park we looked for a hotel and rested until next day.

Click here to go to the 4th day of our Journey...

Glenwood Springs - Grand Junction

What a great start to our trip!

In 2013, Glenwood Springs was named the most fun city in the US, so I knew we would not be losing time while there. 

Woke up early, and at breakfast I found many maps of cycling routes. A great ride is the 25 miles bike path between Glenwood and Aspen, the Rio Grande trail.  

But then I saw on the map this nice climb, 24 miles long, difficult level, with great views and right by my hotel. Perfect, I was ready for it! Got an extra protein bar in my pocket, and told Florencia that I could take a little longer than expected.

The beggining was really spectacular, with great panoramic views (pic in the left down corner), but  I didn't ride too long, before ending up with no outlet, and opening the map again, to find a comma in between numbers 2 and 4, so my climb became 10 times shorter (or 2,4 miles!). haha Disappointed I resumed the workout on the bike path getting close to some beautiful canyon views.

Bike: 24mi - 1h18min

Back to the hotel I met a couple who was ready to go for a bike tour. He was saying to the hotel staff: "We left the car in the hotel parking lot, is that ok!? We will ride for about 2 hours or 5 minutes, depends on the weather." So I saw how lucky I was to be done at that time, as before the fastest clock's hand could turn a loop, it came a pretty heavy rain, that lasted almost for an hour, flooding the hotel entrance. 

When finally the rain went away, we rushed to go to an amusement park located on the top of this mountain. We got there by tram over a beautiful view. And we headed first over a giant swing, just on the edge on that huge clif. In the last picture below you can see how much fun we had together!! Lol

After all that adrenaline of being pulled out of the mountain on the giant swing, we have also joined other stressless attractions and visited two caverns plenty of geology lessons and also nice fun tales. 

The problem came on the time to go away. The heavy rain came back and due to the lightening, the tram went out of work, so we had to wait on the cold of the rain, for almost one hour before getting an improvised bus to get us down to the base, where the Isuzu was waiting for us.

After that cold, nothing better than a hot springs swimming pool! And what if its a 405ft long swimming pool!? Amazing!!

Every swimmer knows how nice is to enter in a warm swimming pool (90°F), and just to enter! As after warming up in a few strokes, it gets terrible hot. But on that day, I had just an easy one, so it was all  very nice!!

Swim: 1600y - 25min

Back in the Isuzu, heading West, we didn't drive that far, until getting into the Colorado National Monument, with no words to describe such amazingness, here follows some shots . . . 

The National Park is located near Grand Junction, and has about 24 miles on a curvy road that crosses it, almost reaching the nearby city, Fruita.

There is more than 10 panoramic view points, with many hike options. We got there by the end of the day and had to rush to drive through all the roadway.

This was one of the best parks in our trip, and we both wished we have had more time to explore it, I would say you wanna spend like 4-5 hours on this park.

On the dark, and already tired, we came back to Grand Junction and found a pretty good hotel, also economic, right in downtown, Historic Melrose Hotel, if by chance you are passing by!

Click here to go to the 3rd day of our Journey...

From Boulder to Los Angeles!

After a big and great block of training with the Apex crew, it was time to drive back to LA. Florencia came to visit me for a few days in Boulder, and has joined me on the trip back to California.

Boulder is the perfect city for training, at least in the summer! And so on, even Florencia did a couple workouts at the gym and went walking on a few trails where I was running. It is a tiny city, but with lots to do its impossible to get bored, in the picture above we are in downtown at Pearl St.

The trip straight away could be done in 17 hours, but driving from Colo to Cali, is like reading "The Alquimist", from Paulo Coelho: You can do it in one day, but you can also go really deep, and it can take several days, if not weeks!

Due to my racing season, I couldn't spend more than a week, so we loaded the car with most of belongings, and shortly we were driving an itinerant residence. Felt a lot like a homeless, but instead of a shopping cart I had my whole stuff in the Isuzu! Including my bike, which I would often take away for training.

The idea was to travel with no rush, we had plans "a", "b" and "c". It would all depend on our will to stay a little longer, explore, or just hit the road.

The result was 1.345mi in six days, and we stopped over: Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction, Moab, Monument Valley and Kingman. Along the way we decided to not go through Las Vegas, as I would be racing there soon, so there was a second trip coming soon!

I think we were very lucky with all the hotels, stops, and attractions, they were all very nice, plus I didn`t miss one day of training, and while I was working out, Flor was dedicated writing her thesis to conclude a Tourism degree back in Argentina. 

The Isuzu couldn`t fit better in this trip, specially crossing the Mojave desert and when getting lost at La Sal Mountains, luckly the 4x4 was up to date! 

More than 2000 pictures and several hours of video! I will be editing and posting piece by piece of our adventure crossing the West side of US!

Click here to the 2nd day of our Journey!