Day 24 – The Storms Change the Winds!

Change is a good thing! In fact, Rev. Charles Homsher, the founder of Neighborhood Bible Time, once told me that he any change is a vacation so he never needed to go anywhere for vacation. Today was no vacation, it was just the start o the stark reality that we are headed west and the winds are normally out of the southwest and not the east like they have been for the past few days. The LORD’s goodness and grace only allowed them to be so for the first three and a half weeks of the trip.

Our first scheduled stop was Scott City, KS where we found this odd structure on the way. An old grain silo? The old corner of an abandoned fort? A prison tower? A giant missile pointed and ready to destroy the moon? If you have any other “great” ideas please let me know! We trudged on to the first city and made decent time.
A while back Wendy’s had a slogan that made the top 10 of the Century, according to adage.com. Well, we found it! As we passed by one of te many cattle feed lots, the final stage before butchering them, the answer was given to all literate people who pass by. “Here’s the beef”. Sorry I couldn’t fit all of the cattle in with the barn but they wouldn’t stand still enough and I couldn’t get them to line up tallest to shortest.


Len Holmes, the man here with Dad, flagged us down to take our picture. Astoundingly, he left from San Francisco, CA on April 26th and will arrive on the banks of the St. Lawrence, Canada on September 10th. This is an amazing trip of many thousands of miles. He was quite jealous of our support team and the fact that we did not have to carry any of our stuff with us! What a nice guy and we would have stayed and talked had it not been for the many miles that still lay ahead of us.

It is said as a joke but I seriously wonder if it is true, that a person could take a tennis ball and roll it down the road starting in Denver, CO and it would roll all the way to St. Louis, MO. Yes it is a joke, BUT the fact that we can hardly ever see over the horizon and the slight hills seem to go on forever makes this a little more believable proposition. The hills that we continued to climb were not steep by any means but combining them with the wind, they became a little more difficult and challenging.
Now, if you have been following this journey from the beginning you will remember that we try to get a picture with every state line sign as we cross into a new state. Remember that KS did not have one on the back road that we took into the state, so today we took two state line pictures.


One with the KS sign as we left the state and one with the CO sign as we entered! This is not an uncommon problem (not having signs on the borders) among cross-country riders and many of them will do what we did!
Often I will try to find a rock to prop our cameras up on and use the self-timer, but this time as we pulled up to the KS sign a nice lady in a car was waiting just for us so that she could take pictures for us. Not really, she was really waiting for her daughter, who was riding alone, who left San Francisco, CA and was going to Yorktown, VA (the typical ACA – Adventure Cycling Association – ending point on the east coast). In talking to them we found out that they were from Holland, MI, which is not too far from where either of us live. She had planned to take this trip with two other friends but the day before they had planned to leave they both backed out so she was left alone. Her Mom and Dad were there to see her off and Mom decided to follow her the entire time. Good for them! What a trip!
We finished our trip to Sheridan Lake, CO on very bumpy roads, which at the end of a long day is quite hard on one’s derriere! We slept good and enjoyed the little old historical town of Sheridan Lake, CO in the clear blue sky of the CO night!