Day three Fort Collins / Red Feather Lake

Day 3 started at 5:00 am. We got our stuff packed and checked out by 6:30. We stopped off at Walmart and picked some stuff. We decided to head over to the town of Gould to find a campground and ditch our stuff. We took Rt. 287 to Rt. 14 to Gould. Finally, we were off the interstate and heading out of town. We drove into mountains and it was awesome. The roads were twisted up into the mountains for two hours. It was a great drive, some of the most demanding road I have ever driven on a bike. It was a lot of work to stay focused on the road and also enjoy the scenery. We finally got to Gould and discovered at the K.O.A was in pretty sad shape. All the trees in the campground were cut down. It was a stump patch. Apparently, beetles were boring into all the pine trees and laying eggs. The problem is the beetle also gives the tree a fungus that kills it. So the insurance company made them cut all the trees down. We decided to skip the campground and see if we could find Evan's buddy from back in Aledo - Steve Johnson. So we headed over to Red Feather Lake. It sounded like a good plan. So we left the stump patch and headed off on a new quest. We figured we could track Steve down and have a good visit. We found the area that Steve lived in but we couldn't find the house. At 5:00 pm were starting to think this idea wasn’t going to work out either. We called him several times and weren't able to find him. So we decided to head up the road to find a campground. Both of us were getting pissed about the way things were working out. At that moment we turned around and Steve was driving up on his Goldwing. We all started laughing. I was so glad to see Steve. Thank God we weren’t going to have another eighteen-hour day on the road. We when back to his home we finally got good nights sleep.