DAY 41 - The day of the Badger

We decide to get up & away earlier today as we wanted to get to Salida as early as we could to get laundry done.
Now that the days are getting cooler & shorter it is very hard for us to get to camp & do hand washing & get it dried so we now need to rely on towns & laundry's
We started along the road & the 1st 20km was again deserted nothingness!! must say it was really quite boring scenic riding - not even cows to look at!
But guess what we did see - a Badger!! just off the side of the road it wondered than sat by its badger hole & let us stop & take photo's of it - it did not seem too bothered about us - very exciting as we have been wanting to see a Badger but they are night creatures generally.
They are quite big - maybe the size of a medium sized dog. (stand by for photo's to come...)
About 30km in we stopped for lunch (10:30am) as we knew we had a 12km hill climb ahead so though we would fuel up before tackling that as we did not know what it was going entail.
When we reached the top of the watershed divide, 50km into the days ride we were faced with a awesome 18km downhill to the town of Salida.
We are now in Salida sitting in the Laundromat waiting for our washing to get done.
After we have done here we are going to go & find our new friend Alan who is also back on the Route, do some supermarket shopping as we have 4 days between descent towns ahead so need to stock up on food to get us through, maybe have some dinner & a beer.
It looks like we have 4 days of quite solid riding ahead including our highest pass Indiana Pass & we have been riding for the past 6 days so we are currently deciding if we should have a rest day here in Salida tomorrow.

DISTANCE: 77.6km
AVERAGE: 17.4km
RIDE TIME: 4.24hrs
ASCEND: 705mtrs

For those who are interested here is a typical days eating for us...
Breakfast:
Porrage with Dried Cranberries
Hot drink

Pre Morning Tea (10km into day):
2x Muesli Bars each or 1x Powerbar

Morning Tea:
Bagel with Nutella (or Peanut Butter - Scott)

Lunch:
Bagel with Cheese slices & Pepperoni x2 each
Piece of fruit (if been in town day before)

End of ride snack:
Muesli Bars or Powerbars
Or if we are lucky & end up in a town, Potato Chips & Chocolate milk or soda of some kind.
If we are really lucky burger & fries..

Dinner:
If we are cooking- Pasta & Sauce , or a Rice Risotto with Tortillas.
If in a town we usually dine out - burger & fries again

After Dinner Snack:
M& M's or skittles while reading our books.

Heathly diet or what!!!! just hope we don't carry on eating like this when we get home!
Could be hard habit to break!