October 11--Mordor II--then home!!

We left Durango at 7:45 a.m., just as a few drops of rain started to fall with 402 miles to go to get home. It was looking very black in Durango, so we planned on having breakfast in Cortez. The weather was mixed, sunny for a while, then cloudy. But on the stretch of road from Cortez, CO to Monticello, Utah we hit 50+ gusts on old route 666 in New Mexico and Hwy 6 Utah. That was horrid! It was the weather ahead of the Hurricane hitting the Baja. We tried to get ahead of it, it was headed north.

By the time we got to Moab, we were ahead of it, but then we met some other storm system from the west, and had more 50+ winds from Moab to the I-70 intersection. By now I was really dreading the stretch from I-70 north to Price, but it was surprisingly smooth until the last 15 miles or so before we arrived in Price. From Price on it looked okay, so we kept going.

By the time we got to SLC and looked towards Bountiful, it was looking pretty black. Steve drove through town at 80+ mph (just keeping up with traffic), and as we drove up Chelsea, it was black and threatening. We pulled into the drive, opened the garage, and pulled the bike in the garage 5 minutes before the snow started. (The picture on the far left was taken the day we left on our trip, and the one on the right was taken 4 hours after we got home.) And snow it did. The next morning we had 8 inches on the ground! Boy did we feel blessed and grateful to be home safely!

We traveled 9,802 miles, across 24 states and 5 provinces, and are glad to be home, but happy we made our journey and thankful for the opportunity to see so much of this wonderful country we live in.