Warming-up is the key to having a good day of biking. The park we stayed at last night was down on a lake so this morning we had to climb up out of the lake area. This made it hard for a warm-up right away. We soon got to the smoother flatter region and were able to warm-up sufficiently. We passed through the little town of La Cyene, KS and as we did we came upon a man sweeping something out of the road. When we got closer he motioned us off the side and said “watch out for the glass”. Oh great! This is not too good. It seemed to be fine until we got about 2 miles out of town and my rear tire was flat. The first in more than a week. We hadn’t forgotten how to change the tube though and were back on the road in about 5 minutes.
The roads were great and the wind was almost directly to our backs. This made for great conversation and enjoyable side-by-side riding!
Speaking of conversation, the people of KS are great and looking for people to carry on a conversation with. I was kind of wondering about the people of a state who don’t even put a sign up welcoming us to their state but I couldn’t have been more wrong about them. We had just finished a stop in Garnett, KS at our favorite spot (Dairy Queen) and had gotten back on the road, which had just been resurfaced less than 3 months ago, when we saw a cool stone fence going around this man’s field where he had a horse and a cow.
Dad signaled that we were going to stop and take a picture so I followed his lead. As we were stopping I saw a man coming out from his barn. He come right to the end of his fence and began talking to us about what we were doing. He had passed us earlier in the day while driving his fuel truck. We told him that we were riding across the country and he was genuinely excited for us! He would have held us there all afternoon and talked to us had we not needed to get going. It is nice seeing people who truly care about people enough to stop what they are doing and talk. Note to self – Don’t be so busy that I forget to talk to people and show interest in them!
We continued on the fresh asphalt through the city of Harris, KS and finally came to Waverly, KS where we stopped for lunch at The Lunch Box Café! I regret that I did not get a picture of this nice little place but you can’t expect my brain to work all the time, can you?!? We had burgers and fries and topped it all off with a warm piece of pecan pie.
Dad and I had almost become so relaxed that I was wondering if we would ever muster up the gumption to even get back on the bikes to pedal out of town let alone the 36 remaining miles to the campground. We dragged our sorry carcasses outside, that are now almost completely stiff from the lactic acid build up, and got on the bikes. We began pedaling and got on a very nice road, again!! Thank the LORD! We worked out the lactic acid and then the food must have really hit the blood stream because we both began to pound the pedals! We polished off the first 20 miles in just over an hour. We came to a point in the road that our good road turned north and actually became a part of Interstate 35. We do not ride on Interstates so we decided to follow the road that continued straight. Bad idea! The road was terrible and our pace was cut in half. That is not the way I wanted to finish the day so I got on the phone with Abigail, who has become a fantastic navigator with the county map in front of her, and she gave us an alternate route to the campground. The road had an even better surface than before and we again felt like low flying aircraft (even though an aircraft flying at our speed would fall out of the sky and crash and burn)!
We came upon this Bike Museum. I talked earlier in the trip about paradoxical signs, well, here is another one. I thought that the place looked very inviting and nicely kept up so I flagged Dad down, we turned around and went back. Bikers and dogs, as I have mentioned before, do not mix at all!
Needless to say, we did not brave the dog, whether it was there or not, and so we simply took a few pictures and finished the trip without incident. I did consider trading in my bike for this one but it was attached to the ground so I passed!
The LORD brought a nice shower and knocked the humidity out of the air. This should make for a fantastic day of biking tomorrow! Again, this cannot be said enough, especially after a day like today, PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW!
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