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.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Missouri was easy

After Evansville the next big stop was St. Louis. We say goodbye to Chris and head out for Wayne City where the couple from the Winery picked us up. Nothing very interesting happened today except I found a bag of jawbreakers on the side of the road... and that was exciting. The floods did divert our route a bit and we had to take the freeway which wasn't as hectic as I thought it would be.

The couple, Brent and Beth Young, were amazing to us. They picked us up and we met most of their little girls, who were adorable!!! We ended up sleeping in the girls room in bunk beds, which was really cool and reminded me of when I had a bunk bed as a kid. They sent us off the next morning with Dairy Queen shirts (they owned one and a subway), good for me cause I only had one non-biking shirt at the time. Thanks so much for the hospitality!!!

So we were off to St. Louis, finally, and made it to Praderborn, a town with a bar and a church. We stopped in the bar and met a group of bikers (vrooom vrooom kind) called the Praderborn Rat Pack. They were really nice to us and gave us a bunch of paraphanalia including bandanas and coozies. One of the guys mailed us a bunch of cherry moonshine that we ended up drinking later in Colorado, more on that later.

So we made it around nightfall to Columbia, a suburb of St. Louis. We stopped at a bar there and waited for Mike Mertz to come pick us up. If you don't know Mike, you should. I met him through ultimate a couple of years ago and he is nothing if not a scholar and a gentleman.
We had a good night bumming around St. Louis until we got rear ended in the middle of the night. Our bikes were on the back of his car on a rack, and Iris' got pretty smashed up, keeping us in St. Louis for a couple of days while she waited for repairs. We really wanted to get to Solstice in Tulsa, so we hitched a ride with Addison, one of Mertz's friends, to the tourney and had a blast as usual at Solstice. Heather flew home and if she doesn't regret it, she should... You hear me Heather!!!!

Then a week of kicking it in Fayetteville and the dreaded Kansas was the next part of the trip. Don't worry, as soon as I get back home I'm taking the Katy (sp?) trail from St. Louis to Lawrence to make up for lost time.

Good Trip

The Cookie Lady's House

Hoosier Hospitality

We bounce from Louisville and immediately cross the border into Indiana and on the road to Evansville, two days away. Today was our first crash... mine. My front tire got caught up in the space between the road and some railroad tracks and I fell pretty hard in the road. As I was falling I looked for cars coming from behind me, which turned out to be good because it allowed me to fall and come out with only one scratch. No cars were coming, thank Jebus, but you knew that part.

So we stop at Hawg's Tavern bar on the way and have some crown shots... and some jello shots. The bar was a typical biker bar and the bartender, Caroline, ended up liking us and our story and hooked us up with everything for $5 plus sent us on our way with a dozen jello shots. I liked that bar.

That night we ended up staying in a little bed and breakfast/ vineyard called Scout Mountain Hideaway, owned by a guy named Mike who was a very cool guy. They had people coming in the next morning so we actually stayed in the barn out back, but we did get to use their hot tub and finish off the jello shots we picked up from the bar.

We leave the hideaway and are on the way for Evansville. On the way we stop at a vineyard for a tasting and it turns out the bartender knows Mike pretty well. He gets some grapes from Mike for the wine. We also met a couple there who had a couple of kids with them and they offer to put us up a couple of nights later if we were coming through their area. We would meet up with them later. We stopped a little while later for lunch and a guy comes up to us and asks us about the trip and all and says, "Yall ever heard of Hoosier hospitality"? He then throws down $40 and says "Well I'm buying your lunch, welcome to Indiana." It's like Southern hospitality, but in Indiana, I love it.

So we make it to Evansville and meet up with a guy named Chris who taught college there and was the ultimate faculty adviser for the college. He ended up taking us out and buying us dinner at a great little German brewery. Then we went out in town to 80's night at some bar in town and danced maybe had a drink or two... or three. The next morning we set off for the rest of Indiana.