Saturday 21/5/05

We have decided now that the weather is just too hot to be riding into the afternoon so we got up today at 6am, which hurt. Our day today is only 50 miles so we should miss the midday sun. The ride was more difficult than we anticipated however because it was all uphill and the sun still got roasting after 9am so we arrived about 2ish (after being harrassed in Subway by a crazy women) in Torrey. On the way we met a German couple called Barbara and Robert (there are more foreign tourists in the outback of Utah than there are indigineous folk, Germans mostly, a bus load of Japanese and a smattering of French) at the visitors centre of capitol reef national park, they were cycling a loop from Las Vegas to the middle of Utah and back again in four weeks and were just about to begin the return journey. They told us to camp where they were as it had a swimming pool, joy! So when we arrived the first thing we did was head to the pool, which wasn't large but was pure heaven after days in the hot, hot sun. Before we got in though there was a little girl swimming with her dad watching so we sunbathed and waited for her to finish, bad move, her old man(and I mean old, he was 65 an she was 8) was possibly the most boring man in the universe and he just had to engage us in conversation. The thing that excited him the most was watching pigs being bathed??!!, that and the fact he could claim $400/month off of the state for being a dad to a child under 16. He was so dull he even carried polaroids of his house and car with him. Anyway that was about it for the day, we sat in the pool till we burnt, played computer games on the game boy and drank 3.2% beer (3.2 is the highest percentage you are allowed in Utah for some strange annoying reason). Just one photo of Capitol Reef National Park sums it up - more canyons and crazy rock formations and scorching heat.