Idaho 2013: Day 14: All good things must pass, sometimes in the rain

We awoke in rainy Cheyenne, Wyoming, to news reports describing the horrific flooding in Colorado. The headlines on the web news sites included "Thousands flee raging Colorado flood" and "Not Over: Flooded Colorado to get heavy rains."

We then packed up bikes for the final time so that we could ride to Colorado.

But first, a free motel breakfast. Our final morning repast of this pig-laden trip included pancakes, yogurt and, just to keep up appearances, a couple of strips of bacon.

It was then time for the final ride of Idaho 2013, a 130 mile jaunt from Cheyenne to Denver.

We decided not to take I-25, which was a good thing, since it was closed due to flooding. We veered onto U.S. Highway 85, called locally the "Greeley Highway."

Once outside of Cheyenne we ran into rain, very heavy fog and gusting sidewinds. We offer no pictures of that scene since we were too busy gripping the life out of our handlebars. In conditions like that you ride as you normally do, only much slower and with a lot of focus. I mean a lot of focus. After about 40 miles the fog lifted, the rain ceased and the winds died down. While in Evans, Colorado, we rode by rising water that was just beginning to reach the roadbed. We received an alert from the GPS traffic service 10 minutes later telling us that Highway 85 was now closed in Evans.

From then on we had an uneventful 90 miles into Denver.

We arrived in Denver (which, to our great surprise, was sunny and warm) and found BMW of Denver. After unpacking our bikes for shipping back to Nashville, we took a cab to our 14th motel of the trip and, just like that, Idaho 2013 was over.

Tomorrow, we fly back to Nashville.

We were treated to wonderful riding, spectacular scenery and the great joy of being with friends out on the open road having an adventure.

See you next year.