Montrose

I didn't leave Rangely until fairly late, and only walked a few miles in the dark before pulling over and rolling out the sleeping bag. In the morning I got started fairly early, trying to beat the heat. The day was spent almost entirely in sagebrush hills. Dry and hot, winding through the canyon. I filled up with water at a rest stop twenty miles in, then did another ten before stopping for the night. The next day started off fairly well, as the green came back into the hills and I climbed up Douglas pass. Going down the far side ripped me up fairly well - the constant slap of pavement, as gravity pulled me down, was hard on the shins and the soles. I filled another bottle close to the top of the pass, where some springs come out of the mountains and run down alongside the road. Quickly, though, the trees and green grass died away, and the last fifteen or twenty miles down into Loma were desolate, again. Flat and dry.
I slept off to the side of some kind of business - not sure what, exactly - and woke up to sprinklers. Fortunately it was already warm enough that I didn't freeze, but by the time I hauled all of my things to safety in the parking lot, everything was soaked. I stood on the pavement in my shorts, dripping, and a man from the business came outside.
"Hey man. What's going on?"
"Oh. I just slept over by the building. I mean, I'm not destitute, I just needed a place to pull over for the night, you know."
He nodded. "That's understandable." And then frowned. "But I'm going to have to ask you to go ahead and get your things off of our property."
I packed up in an adjacent parking lot, and then walked toward Fruita, and Grand Junction. From the Grand Junction library I called another of my mom's classmates from vet school, Pete Jouflas, who picked me up and took me back to his house, outside town. He and his family took me out to eat and put me up for the night, and then made a few phone calls, in the morning, to line up a meeting with the local, NBC 11 news. Kristy, Pete's wife, drove me to a City Market, where a reporter and his cameraman interviewed me.
And then I headed out, on highway 50, for Delta, and made twenty three miles before stopping, at eleven thirty, to sleep.
My parents, this week, took some time off and had been camping in the area, and we arranged to meet, Saturday, in Delta. Seven miles before town, in the morning, they found me walking, and pulled over, and drove me down into town. We spent the night at a motel - cooled off in the pool and played cards and watched softball on the television. After ten weeks, it was a welcome reunion.
Sunday we said our goodbyes, and I headed out, again. Ten miles down the road, in Olathe, I stopped to sleep out the heat of afternoon, and made another ten, into Montrose, for the night. I had planned to go on, but decided that I needed to find a library in the morning, and did so.
I'm only five or six days out from home, and I'm more than ready to be back.