Day Thirty-Three: Durango - Pagosa Springs

Our eyes were heavy when the alarm sounded, knowing in the wee crevices of our weary brains that we had to get going—another day back on the bikes. We wallowed in self-pity with Tic Tac, the Mulligan’s house cat, who reciprocated our depression with raspy, aging meooooows. Both Geri and Tom were working the morning shift at Magpies, so Slate and I had no excuses for procrastinating. We packed up our bikes while soothing music echoed throughout the house, then shut off the lights and the sweet sound of Pandora before walking our bikes down the street.

We stopped at a gas station to stock up on snacks, then returned to Magpies once more for our morning fix. It was a bittersweet hangout as we awaited the doom of another day’s ride, and listened to advice from locals regarding road construction and unpaved shoulders and there’s no way you’re taking Highway 160! and so on and so forth. We filled our bellies with spicy green chile breakfast burritos and Geri’s famous Americanos, and finally said goodbye to the couple that had made our lives effortless with their hospitality over the past few days. Being stubborn as we are, we took Highway 160 out of Durango against everyone’s will, as it was the shortest and flattest route, despite some pesky construction sites. After 20 miles, we stopped in Bayfield for a curbside lunch that consisted of Lunchables, honey-mustard pretzels and apples with “yogurt” dip (no yogurt present, only high-fructose corn syrup and questionable ingredients that caused it to resemble men’s pomade). We carried on another 50 miles to the east end of Pagosa Springs just before nightfall, leaving us with a short amount of time to find a campground and get situated.

We stopped first at Subway, where we debated back and forth, six-inch or footlong? The ever-pertinent question. It was getting dark, so we rode quickly to our first potential sleeping place, which received five stars on Google Reviews—and no wonder, because it was a mecca for the kings of RV travel, which happen to be uppity middle to older-aged people who “enjoy the outdoors,” of course, in the comfort of their palace-like buses, trailers, RVs, whatever you want to call them. It was clear that no one there would be comfortable parking next to a grungy 20-something pair of cyclists in their duct-taped tent, so we moved down the road to our next option: Pagosa Riverside Campground.

This place, unlike the first, was unfathomably welcoming, with a staff who stayed past hours to give us a tour of the campground and all its amenities. We pitched a tent a foot from a still lake which reflected the blazing stars above, and we marveled at how much better this campground was than that skeezy, ritzy other one. It was green, finally, not like the desert, and we were surrounded by drifting smoke from nearby campfires and the distant sound of crickets. It was pretty perfect, and we slept like babies.