It's hard to know where to begin with this post, there is so much to say. I rode 80 miles today, but I didn't mean to. It was sort of an accident... but I should start at the beginning.
Father A and I had a great time last night after I posted talking about many things: my tour, him growing up in Poland, living under socialism, how a pig used to live in the rectory - all sorts of fun stuff. I could have stayed up all night talking to him, but I needed to sleep. Once again I met someone great and my time with them was too short - such is the curse of touring. To borrow the term from Fight Club, I don't want all these friends to just be single serving, but that's what e-mail is for I guess.
I got out around 7:30 Central time, which is good for me with the time zone change. I did the first 40 miles with only a tiny stop to scarf a Cliff Bar, there not being any real towns to stop at before the Missouri River and me knowing there was a good place to break and nap there.
Those 40 miles were on another seamed FPMINTA road, although most not being a bad as the road in to White River. I'm going to shorten that abbreviation just to PMA, by the way, pronounced "puma." You're welome?
I knew that I would be encourtering lots of PMA roads in the midwest. You don't get them out west because they need cold AND moisture to form. The west is cold but even if they get lots of snow its too dry. The PMA roads showed up right around the same time I stopped seeing irrigation equipment in the fields. Usually you get them for maybe 5-10 miles at a time, not 40 miles though. RAGBRAI tries to avoid them a well. They are by far the worst roads to ride on - even worse then the fresh chipseal we get out west (basically a sticky gravel road until the cars pound it down) That atleast gets better with age and you can often ride in the tire ruts of cars. (The roads I had in Oregon this ride were great well flattened chipseal, in 2003 they were terrible about 1 year old chipseal but still better than PMA roads). You can zone out and get a rythm on chipseal, with PMA roads you get a hard loud impact every 2-9 seconds (averaging every 3 seconds) that just rattles you. For hours. I'm running my tires low all the time now (75 psi instead of 90), and figure I'll need to until I'm out of the midwest, sacrificing efficiency for comfort and not breaking my bike. Such is life. At least I have my mind right about it now.
Anyway, today was a day of firsts! After I crossed the Missouri River - the same river that started in Townsend where I spent the 4th of July - I was unofficially in the midwest. It was like night and day, holy cow! I saw my first not-embarrasing corn field. My first Casey's. My first Pizza Ranch. My first Iowa license plate. The seamed road also went away and it got flatter. In the matter of 5 miles it went from stereotypical western South Dakota looks to a place that looks just like Iowa. They say a lot of it is the soil - the glaciers stopped at the Missouri so it's flatter and the soil is much better
I was going to go only 14 more miles from the Missouri River to Platte for a 55 mile day, but when I got there it was only 2:22 and I only had 4:18 on the bike. I figured I'd ride another 14 miles to New Holland and cut some mileage off my day tomorrow - 86 mile with no services or 96 if I detoured for water stops (New Holland the following towns were on the detour). I didn't get out of Platte until an hour later and then got hit by hard wind, but I made it another 14 miles for a 70 mile day - except there was nothing in New Holland. Damn
So I kept going 10 more miles to Corsica, making for an 80 mile day and 6:23 on the bike Oops. In Corsica I stopped at the store for supplies and was offered a place to stay and a cooked meal back in New Holland, and the same in Harrison, the town between here and New Holland. C'mon...
Whatever, they also gave me the skinny on a nice park by the pool that I can camp in, so I went there. I wasn't there for more than 20 minutes when a bunch of kids came up for a 6:30 to 8:30 pool session. They hung out with me for awhile (they were 1st through 7th grade, mostly 5th and 6th) and asked me all sorts of questions about bike touring. I juggled for them and played some songs on the uke, and then after I cooked dinner I joined them in the pool. I think the highlight was that I taught them all the Team Zombie: Zombie Line where you all walk like Zombies off the diving board in a line while moaning for brains.
Winning.
Anyway, this got long. The last first is that I picked up a lightweight bluetooth keyboard to make phone updating suck less. It does disable my spellcheck though... I hope this doesn't mean these get too long-winded and TLDR. Whatevs, there is a lot more want to say :)
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