Day 21 -- Rest Day in Pueblo, CO

Since today was a rest day, we slept in until 9:00. For breakfast we ate some cherries that were left over from yesterday and some peanut butter crackers that I got from the sag stop. There wasn't a continental breakfast at the hotel, so we ate what we had. At about 10:00 Debbie and Tom showed up at our room and Tom helped us try to fix our head set that we use when we ride to communicate back and forth. Apparently they've gotten wet and that hasn't been good for them but without rain I don't know how they got wet... Everyone knows that I don't sweat!!! Anyway, we went with Tom and Debbie to downtown Pueblo and drove around until we found the river walkway. We checked the time to see how long we could do the walk before we had to get to a bar to see the USA soccer game. We had about an hour, so we headed to the river. It was a very nice set up around river and a nice downtown as well, it reminded me of the pictures that Kaye showed me of downtown Austin, Texas, only a smaller version. The river was the Arkansas River, which was the beautiful river we followed yesterday. It was outlined with bricks and concrete, it had waterfalls with water rushing through rocks, and there were many amphitheaters and sculptures. It was so beautiful that I even tried to push Debbie in... It was Wade's idea, I promise. To keep the water level consistent, there was a reservoir up stream and a waterfalls downstream, but I guess only an engineer would care about that. The numerous sculptures downtown reminded me of a very nice downtown in Ohio called Versailles. We took some pictures with the statues and the river, then we moved onto the thing we've been looking forward to for days. By the way, Tom isn't in any of the pictures because he was kind enough to take all of the pictures for us... the one picture I took with him in it is way too blurry, so sorry Tom.

Anyway, we asked some guys downtown and they told us that a nice bar was an Irish Pub called Shamrock. We found the bar, then we did what we've been waiting to do... sit back and watch soccer. This was the first USA game we've gotten to watch of the entire World Cup because we've been riding every day that they play. We did exactly what we set out to do... we watched soccer. We weren't the best company for Tom and Debbie because we were sucked in by the TV. Joan can testify to our tendency to be absorbed into the television. Tom got some good pictures of us staring at the TV. It was a good game, but the wrong team won. We just shouldn't have watched it... they did better when we didn't watch. Oh well, we were first in our group.

After the depression from the loss, we went back to our hotel, showered, then went to church. Fran and Meaghan came with us, so the car was packed. Meaghan claims that she wasn't with us the rest of the day because she was studying for an important test... We all know that she just doesn't like Wade. I'm just kidding, she's taking a test on Monday to become a licensed registered nurse. It sounds like a hard test, so good luck Meaghan. Anyway, we all went to church, came back to the hotel, then we said our goodbyes. We gave them all of our warm clothes to send back to Sidney because from how on it will be HOT!!! Since the connection is really good here, we are adding some videos from some past days: The windmills that showed us how strong our headwinds were, and Wade throwing a snowball at Fran on Monarch Pass. Thank you Tom, Debbie, and Meaghan for coming 2 hours to spend time with us, and thank you for the pictures.