Wednesday August 3rd Dillon to Virginia City

The ride from Dillon to Virginia City was cracking up to be an easy ride. Maybe even like a walk in the park, but on a bike. We didn't leave until 7:20. Pretty smug. The ride through town was not too bad...a little "road debris" every here and there. Nice wide shoulder. So far so good. However as soon as the city limit was over, the shoulder diminished to a few inches and the truck traffic increased significantly. Ugh. Thank God we had a couple of nice spots to pull over to and enjoy some landmarks. 

One landmark was a beaut of a Butte. We enjoyed the white birds on a lake near the Butte, took a few photos and then readied ourselves for "the road." 

Luckily it was only 27 miles until the town of Twin Bridges. There we took a quick break, bought some snacks, used the "employees only" bathroom...and talked positively about the next jaunt down the road to Sheridan. 

With hope in our hearts (that the shoulders would be 20 foot wide and the only vehicles on the road would be electric golf carts), we turned off of route 41 and onto route 287. Uh oh. The road conditions did not improve. The good news was that Sheridan was only 10 miles down the road. We made it in no time and continued on despite the not great road conditions (for bikers anyways).  We looked for any excuse to stop: hey, this cute little town is called Laurin! One of our riders is Lauran! Close enough spelling, let's stop there! Take some pictures, visit a church, sing a song...and then...move on down "the road" to the next town...Nevada City.

Too bad they didn't have any food there, we would have stopped for sure.

Well, onward to our final destination for today: Rambling Moose RV Park and cabins just outside of Virginia City. Virginia City came up first and they had food there, so we stopped.

We shopped around and check out this really cute historic town. We bought some souvenirs and after a couple of hours of goofing around, we made the final push 1/2 mile up to the RV park. As it was straight up from Virginia City, and we were stuffed from all the food and snacks( ice cream especially), that last 1/2 mile was painful.

That's what you get for being smug...so tomorrow, when we ride 3 miles up at an 8% grade... we'll see how it goes. The Rambling Moose accomodations were pretty nice, we had another awesome meal by Lesli! And we were in awe of the beautiful sunset that evening. Another great day spent with adventurous friends!