Shortness of time prevented me from attempting a microadventure before we left for the US, so clearly I was going to have to do a bit of exploring in Pueblo instead. We’ve pretty much been to all the places where the river path will easily take us so we decided to go off piste a bit, and add in something for the other half to enjoy and the #tacosafari was born
The other half tracked down some likely taco places (not hard in Pueblo) that would be nice to cycle to (slightly harder) and with a sunny and warmish day forecast, we set off for a rolling lunch …
Stop 1 was Vazquez Taco Shop, which was just off the river path, so didn’t really count as turning left. It did serve up a mean taco though.*

To be honest, that would have done me for lunch (my normal lunch is two slices of marmite toast and an orange) but we had many more taco shops to try. Having negotiated the other half down from his planned six to three, we set off back along the river path to our next destination.

This meant properly turning left, and onto some less than inviting looking roads. I remembered too late that ‘turning left’ is the hard one in the US. The other half made it through the intersection on two wheels but I wimped out and reverted to two legs to get across, although given I’m still not reliably looking the right way when crossing the road I’m not sure that was really any safer.

yikes
Once through that bit and up the hill we found ourselves at Tacos Navarro, home of the street taco, apparently.

Well, it would be churlish not to …

This was also extremely delicious although we quickly lost track of which taco was which. At this point I decided that I wasn’t going to repeat the experience of getting there on a bike again, so if the other half wanted to try the tamale shop we’d passed on the way, now was the moment.

The less-than-promising exterior of the tamale shop
I was feeling pretty full, plus it was a tamale, so after one bite, which reminded me that I wasn’t that keen on tamales, I left it to the other half to enjoy.

Back down the road, through the scary intersection, blessing the light traffic and the extremely chilled Colorado drivers, we regained the river path and pedalled off our second lunch for a bit until we reached our final taco shop
(this was actually about a block from the first one, but we needed a bit of time in between for digestion)

The Taqueria Marquez was also jolly good although we blew the chance to practise our Spanish by answering in English when we were greeted with a cheery ‘buenas tardes’.

Mental note to self: food photographs better if you haven’t started to tear into it before you remember to take a picture
(This place also intriguingly had three red ‘hotline’ telephones that were something to do with transferring money to Mexico. I was dying to find out more, but didn’t quite fancy asking (or taking a photo – it was bad enough that I was photographing the food as these really aren’t the sort of places where everyone instagrams their meal) and my Spanish wasn’t up to deciphering the instructions.)
Anyway, our third – or fourth – lunch finished, and having picked up an extra plate of tacos (with extra hot sauce) for my father in law, who has contracted the other half’s cold, we got back on our bikes and – like pythons digesting a goat apiece (if pythons had legs so they could ride a bike) pedalled very slowly home…
* I had thought we might review the taco places we tried but I don’t really know much about what makes a good taco, and the other half wouldn’t comment much beyond ‘oh yeah that’s good’ at pretty much everything he ate.