The adventure begins....

Sunday August 12 2018 - up at 7am. The day the adventure is born and begins for real. We are leaving the mountain cabin at Tollgate Canyon to meet our man Spero and his good lady wife Shelley a few miles down the interstate so that they can ride us out of town. Getting down the 2 miles of washboard took us longer than the hop along to the meeting point, but we made it and it feels good to be finally leaving Salt Lake City.
Spero is a born biker and hates the interstate, so we're in great company. 
We are being escorted to just outside of Richfield. Our destination is to Monroe, home of the Mystic Hot Springs, where we will spend the night. The ride through to Monroe is approximately 183 miles. Spero and Shelley depart company from us around Salina, which is about 30 miles from our destination. We were grateful to have the company up until this point.
The roads are endless - long, wide and interspersed with space, land and more space. The vastness of this country and the enormity of the journey we are planning to make is becoming real. We both are feeling totally blessed that we are able to do this and to take our little Himalayans out and about in the American wilderness.  Already we are feeling small in this huge land. 
We find Monroe and the hot springs without an trouble. The towns are few and far between. Monroe is a quiet and modest religious town at the foot of Monroe Peak. We have to travel back 8 miles to Richfield to get something to eat, so at the end of our first real day of riding in the USA the hot springs are a very welcoming treat to two saddle weary bodies. The temperatures we rode in today got up to about 37 degrees celsius (100 degree fahrenheit) and getting into a hot bath at the end of the day may seem like lunacy to the cold-loving British race, but it was actually very refreshing, especially bathing under the stars watching the meteors whizz past and having philosophical conversation with a man named Tyler in the next tub to us who was just passing through on his way home from Salt Lake City. Home for him was two hours away - bordering the states of Utah, Nevada and Arizona. Intrepid America and the pioneering spirit alive and kicking. 

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