Boulder, Colorado 29 August 2014

Yesterday early we left the Driftless, entered Iowa at Dubuque on the Mississippi, got our car's 45k check-up, and headed out across Iowa. Iowa is on my list of least favorite states. Iowans are nice until they get in their cars. And their roads are awful. Enough said.

We ate at Dixie Quick's in Council Bluffs -- unexpectedly delicious -- and put Iowa and an hour of Nebraska behind us, and breakfasted this morning in Lincoln, then the long gently upslope haul across the rest of Nebraska and the upper right corner of Colorado, along the Platte River all the way.

Boulder is a favorite city, but has grown horribly in the 12 years since we last visited. The outsquirts have outsquirts now, so there are two bands of strip malls and big box stores on the eastern (flatter) edge now. No pictures of mountains for you yet -- that will be tomorrow -- but the afternoon thunderbumpers are in full effect. We're about to walk from our lovely 1950s style motel at the foot of the mountains downtown.

Here, with the Front Range in sight and the prairie behind us, I have the strange feeling that I have crossed a big water, and reached the eastern coast of my continent. Onward through Rocky Mountain National Park, over a couple of 11,000+ foot passes, and westward into Utah tomorrow. The sense of swimming underwater since last Thursday is slowly abating.

Wonderful Thai dinner at Khao Thai. A little anxiety about tomorrow's high passes kept us from sleeping as well as we would like.