We’ve now completed 3 weeks of our 9 week tour. The week was spent riding across the state of Wyoming. You can see the daily summary for this week in the chart at the bottom of the page. I would have to say the scenic highlight thus far is probably Grand Teton National Park and certainly the most physically challenging day of the entire tour was Thursday’s Powder River Pass. This is also the absolute highest elevation point we will reach this summer.

We faced the 90 mile 9000′ gain day with all we had, both physically and mentally and conquered it! Interestingly, when we opened Bill & Sooz’s inspirational message the next day we found we had already applied the message of “gratitude” throughout our most challenging day.

During the week there was an abundance of road kill of every kind including the usual suspects: deer, skunks, raccoons, and expanding to include a wide variety of snakes, a porcupine, a fox, and an antelope. As the week progressed we saw less of both living and dead animals. Even the birds seem to be few and far between. Not to say there aren’t any. We’ve seen some raptors, crows and Western Kingbirds. I downloaded a free bird identification app for our Android phone to help a couple of weeks ago when there were a lot more birds including Kingfishers and Osprey.

We’re now settled into Hulett, 9.5 miles past Devils Tower enjoying our weekly motel rest-day, doing laundry and catching up on email, blogging and the Tour de France. We’re situated across the street from a tiny grocery store that stocks soy milk! And right on a river with a bench to do our morning meditation. We’re in such a singularly focused daily schedule that we feel pretty isolated from world news and politics. It’s actually rather a nice change of pace. Monday morning we’ll have breakfast here and continue on the route. Those camping at Devils Tower will ride the extra miles Monday morning instead.

The weekend  rest-day post gets written either Saturday night or early on Sunday before we’ve had our full day. So I wanted to report that on last Sunday’s rest-day in Jackson we went to a matinee showing of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Prior to leaving home at least 4 friends had mentioned it as a must-see. We can now concur. Great cast, well acted, very sweet, romantic and poignant. Plus, it’s relevant to those of us exploring the third act of our lives.