Riders on the Storm

For information, Escondido, *this* is how you do a river path…

We have returned to Pueblo, Colorado, which is currently on course for record rainfall levels in May.* Unlike Southwest Scotland, though, the rain seems to be concentrated in intense bursts rather than the sort of pacing-itself drizzle we’re used to. So today, although the clouds were building ominously over the mountains, we felt the need to burn off our lunch at Papa Jose’s by cycling to the secondhand bookshop to stave off the danger of running out of things to read.

Yup, definitely still closed

We were hopeful that the absence of a path closed sign on the river path meant that the flooding had receded but it quickly turned out that it just meant someone had stolen the sign.

It did look as if we could scramble along the bank some way and rejoin the path downstream, thereby avoiding the Enormous Scary Junction but after I spotted a snake in the undergrowth we decided that tangling with the traffic would be preferable, although in the end we managed to scramble up a bank and avoid the worst bit of the road. We then misread the signs (and by ‘misread the sign’ I mean ‘believed the sign helpfully directing bikes to the river path didn’t involve going over an enormous scary bridge’) and did enough riding in traffic to make tangling with snakes look like the better option. But we arrived at the book shop unscathed by either pickup trucks or snakes, and then found the slightly less scary route back to the coffee shop that gives you 10% if you come by bike where we sat in the welcome shade and had a giant coffee (the ‘small’) and watched the clouds get slightly more ominous as time passed.

10% off if you come by bike…

Then it was a simple matter of racing the rain home – arriving, very satisfyingly, just as the first drops began to fall.

* If any other drought-struck region would like us to come and visit and bring the weather gods with us to sort out their water table, our rates are very reasonable…