293 miles, 8.5 hours.

It was very cold overnight. I spent the second half of the night only half-asleep, because I couldn't stay warm (even though I was fully cold, in my cold-weather sleeping bag, with a liner, etc).

Putting away the tent was a little difficult, because it was SO wet from all the overnight dew. It hadn't rained, but I had to shake the tent to get some of the water out of it. Oh well- I'll reassemble it in a few hours anyhow.

As I was getting packed up, there were a couple stray cats wandering around the park. I was able to make friends with the younger one by slowly approaching her until I was close enough to put my hand out. Once I did, she nuzzled up to me, purring and head-butting. I gave her lots of lovin', then carried her back to my campsite and set her down while I finished packing.

The roads in Kansas and the eastern half of Colorado are the same: straight, flat, and boring. It was exciting to see mountains for the first time- about 65 miles east of Colorado Springs (where the mountains begin). The only exciting thing was seeing a Triumph semi truck- the truck and trailer were completely covered in the Triumph logo and pictures of the bikes. I'm not sure if it was a transport truck or used for demo rides and such.

I rode through Colorado Springs and up to the Pikes Peak Highway. I've always wanted to take the road to the top of Pikes Peak. PP is famous among gearheads because of the annual Pikes Peak Hill Climb. The fastest records are around the 10-minute mark- it took me just under 24 minutes to reach the top, and I wasn't pushing it really hard.

I was really curious how the bike would perform. It's only a 650cc, making about 65 horsepower at sea level. An online calculator says the bike should be making 56% of that power at the top (14,000 feet). That's 36 horsepower, about the same as a DRZ400. The bike was certainly slower to accelerate, but there was absolutely no hesitation, ignition miss, backfire, or anything of the sort. It just took longer to reach the correct RPM.

That is significantly different than when Dad and I had our two DRZs at 10,000 feet. Dad's would hardly run or accelerate, and mine had serious hesitation. So being on the butter-smooth DL650 at 14,000 feet was dreamy compared to the DRZ at 9,000 or 10,000 feet.

The road up to Pikes Peak is nice. It is mostly paved (at least half is paved, probably more), and the "gravel" sections are completely predictable: wide, smooth, perfect. I wouldn't hesitate to take any vehicle up Pikes Peak because of the gravel- on the other hand, I'd probably avoid taking a carberated bike or older car, though.

On the way up I saw something very interesting. It was a Volkswagen hatchback, decked out with some sort of instruments on the roof. It was a "scientific" roof rack- I don't know how else to describe it. My first thought was it was a Google photo car.

Once they reached the top (I was a bit faster up the mountain than most), I chased the guys down to talk with them. After a few quick questions, I discovered the instrument on top was rotating LIDAR (with a few GPS antennas for good measure). The LIDAR can sense the terrain as well as texture/reflectivity, meaning it can sense the road surface and nearby obstacles very accurately.

It didn't take me long to discover these guys were part of the DARPA Grand Challenge. In fact, this was the VW/Stanford Roadrunner team's entry, titled "Junior", which finished second in the Urban Challenge. I really enjoyed my conversation with Tim, one of the guys involved with the car. I was able to see they were running Fedora Linux, using GPS, differential GPS, and an inertial sensor, and that the car was equipped with all the electronics for sensing and driving the car, even though they were disconnected so they could drive it. There were two servers installed in the trunk, among other systems. It was a great chance to geek out.

It was finally time to go down the mountain. My vision was a little gray because of the lack of oxygen, so I was looking forward to descending a couple thousand miles so I could breathe again.

I ran to the bottom of the mountain, then went west to the Florissant Fossil Beds. There are many fossils there, but the main thing are redwood tree stumps that are up to 12 feet across. In one of the stumps you could see the tree grain; in another, there were some saw blades from when early explorers tried to cut the fossilized stumps to take them home.

Finally, I rode south, east, and north through some backroads before heading towards my evening campsite, which was a dispersed campsite at 10,000 feet, not far from a Mennonite camp- weird. My campsite is 10 feet from a stream, and I'm all by myself. It's really pleasant.