Just a Slow Life Day

May 26, 2026  — Day 63

Rifle Gap State Park, Rifle CO

We didn’t do any sightseeing today, just life maintenance. First up? Off to town.

Of course we admired the colors of lake. (susan here: and those trees with their fresh spring green leaves!)

Then off on adventure. First stop was an auto parts store. When we left Moab we gassed up and Paul left the gas cap there. (It had a tether but that always fell out.) Since Susan was the passenger she found an “auto parts store near me” on google maps and hit it and off we went. Or so we thought. Eventually, Paul realizes that Google is routing us onto I-70 East. Huh? Rifle has tons of auto parts store. He looked closer at Susan’s phone—he uses Apple Maps—not Google Maps and realized that Google had routed us to an auto parts store that was 9 HOURS away! We found one in Rifle, CO. Of course we don’t know Rifle and the one we picked was far away. In the process we messed up on a merge which resulted in a wrong turn onto I-70 West. (susan here: in Paul’s defense it was a very confusing roundabout. That’s saying a heck of a lot from two people from Keene, NH where roundabouts rule.)

The good news is that the next ramp was only 3 miles down the road. It was there we found this:

A helicopter was hovering, with a long line beneath it, but nothing was attached to the line. We’ve actually seen these back home, and they usually have a person on the end of the line! We think was some brave soul who’s willing to inspect power lines or something.

We made it to the parts store, bought the part, then made our way to the lunch spot in town, a place called The Catrina. We both loved our Mexican food. Paul had Birria, Susan had Pollo Azteca (chicken breast in authentic stew of onions, tomatoes, potato chunks, garlic and spices) We didn’t take photos because it smelled and looked so delicious we just forgot to! (susan here: that was probably in my top 5 meals ever at a Mexican restaurant and the portion was enormous! It was 3 meals worth for me!)

Then we went to the Library for some internet and inspected a bike path in a small park in town (we gave it a thumbs down).

On the way back we passed this fence. We had seen it coming in and it went on for quite some distance. We just want to know why would someone build a fence made of bicycles!