Saturday, August 9, 2008

Kansas is awful, Lawrence doesn't belong there.

After a good July 4th week in Fayetteveille, it's time to hit the road again from Lawrence, Kansas. I love that place. We caught a ride there with Iris' mom and also picked up a couple of more people on our way. We leave with 6 folks, the original three plus Laura Gunter, my friend from St. Louis, a friend of hers who dropped out after a half day (knee problems), and a 16 year old kid named Thomas who lived Fayetteville. He would be on the trip with us to Denver where he met up with a church group for the week. We stayed with Iris' half brother and he took us out to a bar with a kick ass band.

So we obviously wanted to ride as far as we could each day to get the hell out of Kansas as soon as possible. We did pretty good the first day, around 85 miles, to right outside of Manhattan. We were at a gas station where we met a guy and his twin daughters who offered us a place to stay. They were pretty awesome and a nice little farm place outside of town. We cooked dinner and showered up and went to bed.

The next day was another 85 mile day to Concordia. We got into town late and it was raining pretty hard and we didn't really have a hit on a place to stay except maybe the city park. Iris was going to check that out and passed by a fire station that offered to put us in the extra rooms for the night. This place was awesome, it had showers, a computer lab, a huge TV, and we could make it home. We would be trying to find places like that a lot more along the way.



80 more miles the next day to Smith Center. I liked this town a lot. There was a campground there which would have been fine to stay in, but other people wanted showers and whatnot so went to check out the scene. I was happy with camping, so me and Laura went to the pool to hang out for the rest of the day. After the pool closed, we ran to meet up with the others at the bar street and they had found us a place to stay with a painter named Chris(???) He was a nice guy and had just finished a house so was celebrating and bought us some beer and a pizza. We shut down the bar and slept in his back house, but the most ironic part was that the three who didn't want to camp ended up camping anyway behind his house. Apparently the back house was too hot, but I was too drunk to care, plus there was a matress, which I hadn't seen in a couple of days so I was all for it.

The next day was our first century day!!! Woohoo and shit! We made it into Oberlin that night pretty late and went to a pizza pie shop, really the only thing open in town. We asked around for a place to stay but we were just directed to the hotel down the road. We stayed in a tiny hotel room, so small we had to lock our bikes up outside. At least we had a warm shower, though.


The next day was pretty light, only about 70 miles, but it would be our last night in Kansas, so we were pretty ecstatic. We stayed in St. Francis, the last town before Eastern Colorado, with a high school physical education teacher named (???). His family was nice; there were a bunch of kids running around playing with neighbors when we got there. The town seemd pretty nice, too, especially in comparison to the tiny towns we had been passing in the last week. Thomas bought us all ice cream in celebration of finally making to Colorado, or at least being close enough.


Kansas is NOT flat. It's actually like a stair step up all the way to Colorado. We were just happy to be going less uphill when we did, and that was few and far between. The headwind was tolerable on most days, I remember only one bad day in particular. But I was so sick of seeing corn and wheat fields and nothing else I was happy to be in the Colorado desert.

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