Colleen's Journal: Week Six

Nice break.  Mostly I relied on the incredible hospitality of the DePews for the weekend.  For people who just had me sprung on them, they dealt very well, and they went out of their way more than I can recount to help me out, from feeding me to entertaining me and - no, I am not making this up - securing me a massage appointment and taking me there.  They reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in a long time: that when I first planned to bike around America, about five years ago, a big impetus for it was the chance to believe in the goodness of people, to break out of my own shell and go meet people and allow them to help me.  I tend to be ludicrously self-reliant, and it's hard for me to accept that other people can give things to me, just let it be okay.  But we've been doing that whenever possible on this trip, and I'm learning just to be grateful and glad, not embarrassed, at accepting someone else's kindness.

Then my parents arrived on Saturday afternoon, and I spent some time with them, mostly relaxing.  We went down to Springfield to see Lincoln's home and tomb and such, and the Dana-Thomas house, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's earlier creations.  It was a restful time, but there's not all that much to tell you about it.

So, back on the road with my parents.  My mom is driving along and carrying the trailers, and my dad is biking with us.  It's rather cool, especially in an area rather bereft of services - mom can scout ahead and tell us what to expect.  And make lunch.  And bring us more water.  All of these are Good Things.  Twould be nice to have such amenities all the time, and in fact I think I'd be a lot closer to being able to bike the whole thing if such were true, but it ain't.

It was another quiet day, as days go, given that we biked absolutely straight west for 60-odd of the 72 miles.  For those of you who assume that the midwest is monotonous... well, you're right. (It's more than recompensed by the fact that the people are terrific, for the most part.)  But there are times when you would be happier for the monotony.  For example, as I've said in the past, we pass a lot of soybeans and corn.  Tons of it.  (Apparently we're not witnessing genetic engineering, but hybrids.  That makes me feel better.)  I'd be just as happy to keep passing nothing but soybeans and corn, and skip the Disgusting Nauseating Odors of Hog Factory Farms.  Eulch.  Nasty.  For any of you who might be unaware, hog farms nowadays are just about the surest guarantee around for keeping neighbors away.  The smell is unbelievable and permeates a huge region.  Aside from the fact that there's no good way to dispose of the waste.  A bonus: even hog trucks passing us left that effluvium in their wake.  Gah.

The day was also noteworthy in that it was the hottest we've yet encountered.  It was ninety by the time we left in the morning, and the heat index (what it felt like) reached one hundred five in the afternoon.  That, kids, will get to the least heat-susceptible of us, namely me.  Even after we'd stop and rest in air conditioning, my entire body would be slick with sweat.  I kept having to wipe my sunglasses off because drops of sweat would make it down into my eyelashes and be spattered about.  It wasn't too sunny, but it was tremendously humid, and the heat was just pretty revolting.  I don't know how we would have managed if we were hauling trailers.

Finally, at about four-thirty, a big storm sprang up.  It was heralded by strong winds for about half an hour, jets of lightning, irascible growls of thunder.  All interesting, but more to the point, cooling the air off significantly - like about twenty degrees.  And then the rain hit.  People have asked us occasionally what we do when it rains, and so far the answer had been, pull off and wait it out, but this time we were only too happy to keep riding in it.  Except that it was so hard, it really stung (I kept thinking there were hailstones in it), and that we were not particularly visible, on a two-lane road with no shoulder.  So we pulled off, slogged our way half a mile to a stand of trees, and waited it out there.  It was actually reasonably pleasant.  Would have been another matter if we had to camp tonight, but it was okay.

Sadly, at about the same time I realized I was quickly developing a bad rash, which worsened exponentially from there until the end of the journey.  Ye gods.  My legs are coated in it; if I touch it, it feels like I'm being flayed alive. I don't have words for how tender it is.  Damn painful.  And I don't know what it's from or how to deal with it.  It isn't responding to aloe or Benadryl, and, well, if it's exacerbated by more of the same tomorrow...  Allergy?  Sensitivity to heat and the sun due to meds?  Dunno.  As often happens when something that profoundly affects my ability to enjoy the trip comes up, it makes me question whether I can go on.  If my arm hurts all the time when I'm biking, if my knees hurt, if I can't breathe, yadda yadda.  So here's a new one: if I break out in a rash just from prolonged exposure to sun.  Depressing.

That was pretty much our day.  Heat, thunderstorm, rash.  Little things to notice, like that we saw almost no road kill today (but our first owl!) and no gloves at all; that my bike was extraordinarily "twitchy" and over-sensitive, perhaps from not carrying the trailer, perhaps from adjusting my seat to try out George's suggestion; that the watering system for the corn crops is stupidly timed, doesn't stop even when there's a thunderstorm and goes on at five in the afternoon, instead of the evening when things are cooler.  Apparently even farmers don't necessarily know how to utilize nature the best.  However, if there are any farmers reading, here's a question: why do periwinkles grow in such profusion right by the side of the road, a blazing strip of purple, but not farther back?  Why does it look like there's a strip of periwinkles and then a strip of Queen Anne's lace, in the margin abutting a corn crop?  Is it something to do with spraying the crop with pesticides?  Exhaust fumes that some plants can handle better than others?

Heck, one more thing before I sign off.  It's something I've meant to say for a while and keep forgetting.  I'd like to know if we've picked up any readers, other than the people to whom we announced the site.  If you've come to these pages by meeting us on the road or stumbled over us on the 'net, lemme know.  Write me (colleen @ intrepidheroines . net, without the spaces in there) and tell me what you think.  I'd like to know whom we're carrying along with us, at this point.

I didn't actually bike all the way to Quincy, myself - got "sagged" the last ten miles or so by mom - but it was still the longest day we've yet had.  I strongly suspect it's the longest day we'll do on this journey, as from here on out we won't have the benefit of trailer-less-ness and a support vehicle, and by the time we might build up our leg muscles enough to accomplish crazy wild feats of distance, we'll be hitting Some Famously Large Mountains.  Anyway, I did over 80 miles today, and Molly and dad probably did about 90.  Be impressed, everyone.  It was godawful hot again today.  Not quite as bad as yesterday, and not as humid, but still not the sort of thing one would normally set out in for leisure riding.  Most people think themselves witty for commenting that we've "picked a hot one for riding."  Even I'm not that dumb, to have picked a day that hot for biking 80 miles.

It was an uninspiring day, and sadly, I think there are going to be a succession of them.  There's almost nothing to report about Very Rural Illinois - an area where you'll pass nothing but corn for miles on end.  Towns post their population, and the largest we hit today (aside from Quincy, where we planned to make our stop) was about 12,000; most were between 100 and 1500.  Needless to say, there's nothing and no one in a town of 100 people, yet it's marked on the map.  This bodes ill for days to come, when we'll be counting on being able to get at least water and hopefully groceries and a place to stay at a lot of the places we pass through.  Ice has become of phenomenal importance, too.  A full bottle of ice melts to a half bottle of water in less than five miles in this heat, and we made stops generally every 10-15 miles today.  You do the math, on how quickly we went to drinking warm water.  And from here on out, again, we won't have mom dashing ahead to collect ice for us, and such.  I'm worried, frankly.  If it stays this hot, we're gonna be in trouble.

The towns are all dying.  Mom reports this even more than I do - she went off our path at points, looking for services, and came across "business districts" (even towns of 200 have them) which were nothing but boarded up buildings.  Everyone is moving to the big cities. No one wants to stay in isolated areas doing thankless, hard, smelly work.  The kids move to the coasts, get training as engineers - all those with the initiative and ingenuity to escape.  The family farms are being replaced by huge factory farms, where everything is mechanized or done by migrant workers.  I don't know how much more of this we'll have to go through until we start seeing something different.  I do know the population will be pretty scarce from here until California, which is, of course, most of the rest of the way.  Broken up by Denver and Salt Lake City, true, but nothing much aside from that.

It's been a while since I fundamentally questioned whether I could do the remainder of the trip, but I did so today.  It was just miserable.  The heat, barely kept at bay by mom's ice stops; the fact that most of my body hurt, between knee pain, my plantar fasciitis acting up, both shoulders hurting - I had to alternate holding them behind my back - the raw spots on my butt, the rash on my thighs, and common-variety neck pain (just from holding your head in that position for so long).  Today was more about pain management than biking.  We were doing really well, averaged 14.5 mph (again, the highest we'll ever get, I'm sure), the roads were for the most part very good, land was fairly flat, but I could almost never relax into the biking, because my body was constantly whining at me in some form or another.  It's hard to look forward to another month of biking (until Burning Man) if it's all going to be about heat and pain.  I thought hard about it, and finally suggested to Molly that we try to make it as far as Salt Lake City and then catch a ride (or take a bus) the rest of the way to Burning Man.  It's a workable solution, will give us a destination to aim for and let us divy up the time better; we'll see.  I'm still worried, though.  I wish I had some brilliant, go-gettum words for y'all, but I really don't, today.

Muuuuuuch better.

It stormed prodigiously last night and cooled things Way the Heck Down.  Late in the afternoon, it got above eighty, but for most part, it was very pleasant today.  Wet, but pleasant.  I don't know what to expect for the whole rest of the trip, but apparently we've got another couple of cooler days coming our way, and hopefully once we start getting into more elevation, in a week or so, that'll help cool things down as well.

Also, we are now on Route 36.  This has little significance to the casual observer, but to the keen private investigator recording our every conversation, it hearkens back to a few idle words we had from a trucker in Indiana, who told us that he'd driven the route from Colorado.  It seems to be more populated than the roads we were on yesterday, thus far, and tonight we found a motel in the middle of nowhere, in a town with a population just over 1000.  So perhaps we won't be quite up the creek I thought we might, gauging from the last couple of days, while on this road.  Certainly there were enough services to have gotten ice better than we were anticipating.  Unfortunately, it also means that we're sharing a two-lane highway with (thus far) no shoulder, with an abnormally large number of 18-wheelers.  Most of them are pretty considerate, but there's just no way to get around the fact that they take up huge portions of the road and whoosh by at 60-odd miles an hour, which creates winds that buffet about poor hapless biker chicks.  It's more fun if they're going the same direction, of course; when you meet them, you brace yourself for Wall Of Wind afterwards, and you hope to god you aren't meeting them on a steep ascent.

First thing today, we crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri.  That's a darn cool way to start off your ride, I gotta say.  Sure, the Continental Divide is significantly west of here, but this is more like the dotted line down the middle of the nation.  It's a big barrier, possibly the best known river in the States, a long bridge to cross and a really really nice view.  And a sense of "hey, we're something akin to halfway."  Halfway doesn't sound like much when you're feeling awful, but it's a huge bite for a someone who didn't know if she was going to make it beyond the first week.  That's one small step for (Lance) Armstrong, one giant leap for bikerchick kind.

My parents were able to stay with us for only half of today.  Originally, when I'd clamored to them, "I'm gonna bike across America!", my dad had said, "C'n I come too?"  We'd hoped he could join us for a week or so, but job-timing turned out poorly, and he had to fly out of St. Louis tonight to go to Texas, so we did a half-day and were glad even for that.  We had a broad shoulder for some of the ride, letting us ride side-by-side and chat and such.  I should mention that my dad had his knee replaced a year and a half back.  He's one of the most athletic guys I know - before that, he played volleyball, softball, and basketball, ran marathons, biked, canoed, lifted weights, and even swam a bit, just so he could do triathalons.  But an old, old knee injury finally caught up with him and he became bionic man, being told he could do nothing that involved running or jumping, which cut out most of it.  He's rehabbed himself really well, working out and training on the bike, and he's, as before, a far better athlete than I.  But totally humble and unassuming about it, very low-key.  He put up uncomplainingly with whatever pace I could set, offered some suggestions for my biking problems (gearing up a bit to keep my butt from bouncing as much on the seat, for my poor butt pain), and just enjoyed the time with us, even though it was miserably hot.

He also, to my amazement, wiped out today.  As in, on the pavement.  The shoulder had gone from tolerable to in-, and Molly and I hopped our bikes up on the edge of the road, but dad's wheel is narrower and he got caught and went down.  Eeep!  That's a horrifying thing to hear behind you.  He came away with a minimum of damage in terms of road rash, a nasty bump on his hip, and a cracked helmet that indicated he would have had a concussion, had he not been wearing it.

Wear your helmets, guys.  They're not cool, they're dorky, they cost money.  They can also save your life, or at least prevent significant injury.

We were only sixteen miles from the end of our shared journey, so he made it okay to the stopping point, at which point we retrieved our trailers from mom's van, had some sweaty hugs, and saw them off.  I hope they made it to Hannibal, MO, home of Mark Twain.  I would have liked to myself.

Molly and I went into a Pizza Hut or somesuch and had a regular old conversation about mileage and plans and stuff like that.  La la, yadda yadda.  And then a song started up from the jukebox, one of Sarah McLachlan's, and it just ripped me right open, the melancholy croon, and I went outside and sat down on the curb and wept.  I see my mom every couple of months, write her every week and vice versa.  We don't understand each other at all, but we make a lot of effort and we meet halfway when we can.  She was a real trooper about these few days, pretty much putting herself at our service to cart us and gear and ice and schtuff, scouting out rest areas and ice cream.  It probably wasn't all that much fun for her, and I'm really glad she was there.  But I see my dad far less often.  He's a man of few words; they're well-chosen, deliberate, calm.  He impresses me immensely with how he absolutely never complains, how he just goes ahead and does what he needs to - like the knee-replacement thing, or wiping out on the pavement.  Not a word of "ow," whereas I've been verbally wincing at all my myriad booboos.  I wish I could be more like him, in that.  And there's so much I'd like to say to both of them, but I don't know how.  I guess, like most kids and their parents.  That's how it is: you can't tell them the most important things, sometimes.  There's this big barrier of "they just wouldn't understand."  Not in a world in which values and goals and fears change from one generation to the next.  All of which is brought home all the more poignantly by watching two friends' parents die recently, and watching the regrets inherent there.

There was also a sense of loneliness, then.  Of feeling a cross-over having just taken place.  From here on out, we're more on our own.  More acutely self-reliant.  Fewer people, fewer towns, fewer friends to stay with.  A lot of hard work between here and Burning Man.  As unbelievable as it might sound, the next month is likely going to be harder than the previous one.  Probably hotter.  Definitely the most challenging terrain.  Colleen with a host of ailments already yipping at her (though it should be said, barely a peep from my breathing in quite some time).  More to carry, as we hit sparser country and need to have more food and water with us.  We saw just how hard it was in the last couple of days, on flat ground, with no trailers, with someone bringing us ice and water and telling us, "Okay, meet you in ten miles."  I imagine it can get a lot worse.

I know, I can bail out at any time.  This isn't like a war or something.  I have control over this situation.  But I don't want to use the panic button.  I want to do this trip, like I planned for.  When the going gets tough, the tough groan and grunt their way up hills...right?

So we resumed our trailers, and och, believe me, that wasn't thrilling.  The wheeeee! of going 19 effortless mph is probably gone until, um, the downhill side of the Rockies.  There was a period of adjustment, of "oh. yeah. those albatrosses."  But I'm used to it again, already.  And we had a rather pleasant day.  Nothing unusual, scenery-wise.  Back to the roadkill.  Two snakes today.  (We saw four in quick succession, in a pocket of Illinois; I'd been wondering when we'd start encountering them.)  Peeing in the corn.  Big skies.  My butt hurt significantly less, possibly due to trying to bounce less on my seat, possibly due to Molly's raising the seat a bit more, possibly both.  We found a cheap motel right where we wanted one.  We have good, cheap groceries with us - even pita bread and portabello mushrooms!  We got to wash our clothes in the sink and log in via Molly's cellphone.  And ooh ooh ooh! I happened to catch, without even trying, the single episode of West Wing that I hadn't seen from this season.  Oh bliss.  And honestly, these little things can add up.  Make for a nice day.  Your world whittles down, when you're biking across America.  It might be a good thing or a bad thing, but it really is the way things are.

An exceeding pleasant day, as Shakespeare would have said, had he been bicycling across America and only permitted to use four words.

We got a rather late start, as we often do from a motel, when you'd think you'd get an earlier start, because you don't have to pack the tent and such.  But tasks expand to fill time available, and there are always things to do that don't get done, in terms of computer-and-phone-connection-time.  And this morning I did a lot of math, and I'm blonde, so it took a long time.  But I was pleased with the figures.  Maybe I wouldn't have been if I'd done the math a second time, so I stopped while I was ahead.  Anyway, the figures came out to a totally reasonable amount to expect that we do from here until Salt Lake City - about 54 miles a day, on average - and I intend to catch a ride or a bus or somesuch from SLC.  (I know, there aren't buses to Burning Man, but I figure I can get one at least as far as Winnemucca, and resume riding there, which is totally doable.)  We'll do more on the flatlands so as to save ourselves grief in the mountains, so try for 65-70 miles a day for a while and then taper off.  In fact, we had an incredibly efficacious day in terms of saving ourselves effort in the future, including lining up a place to stay (via the Touring Cyclists' Directory again) a few days hence, plotting out our route to hit Topeka (there aren't many major cities around here are thare easily reachable by anything but interstates, and we do need big-city things on occasion, like bike shops), and so on.  Hence, we got a late but not particularly reprehensible start.

We stopped in Macon for food, and got a rather rude shock.  Macon was a larger kinda town on our map, perhaps 5000 or so, and we'd been rather looking forward to real food, but we encountered mostly chain fast food places.  Literally, before us were KFC, Taco Bell, Subway, McD, BK, Sonic, Hardee's, and Pizza Hut - but we had to get directions and go a mile down the road to find a locally owned place, i.e., cooking not out of a package.  And that seems to be pretty standard out here.  Disappointing.  It's not that I assume a cafe will have great food - just some individuality, some leeway.  And yes, I hate watching corporations divy up America.  I would never have guessed that they were gobbling up the midwest.  (Not that we're immune: we then patronized a WalMart, because we needed a battery for Molly's odometer and were hoping to find the one brand of sunscreen that has served us very well, and these are not readily available at convenience stores.  Do I contradict myself?  Very well, I contradict myself; I contain multitudes, including, apparently, something of the hypocrite.)

Thereafter we had a fairly short day, made much better by the fact that for much of the ride, we had shoulders to the roads.  You wouldn't believe how much of a difference this makes.  It's vastly more comfortable, not to have huge trucks passing by a couple of feet away and swirling us into their wake o' winds.  It gives us much more leeway.  We know we're not in anyone's way, endangering anyone else or ourselves.  We can swoop downhill and chug uphill in much greater comfort.  And we can talk.  Which is, duh, the biggest bonus of all.

 A few strange bits from the day: Yesterday I had noticed that there seemed to be more 18-wheelers heading towards us (east) than with us.  Now, this may come across to the casual observer as believing the worst of a situation, but it really did feel that way to me.  So we had ourselves a new game today - I counted oncoming trucks, Molly counted outgoing.  Whoopie do, right?  Just another thing to amuse ourselves, like roadkill or license plates.  But numbers bore out my observation: there seemed to be about half again as many coming at us.  Which begs the question, why?  We hypothesized.  Perhaps there are more trucks coming from Denver, bearing loads of rock or whatever it is they export from Colorado, aside from broken-legged skiers.  (Do they quarry rock in Colorado, or is it all state lands & Bureau of Land Management?)  Perhaps it's because we're heading slightly uphill and therefore the trucks are heading slightly downhill and don't mind using this more scenic route (we were told by saidsame trucker of last entry that it was scenic), but when heading into Denver, they want to use 1-70, which is a larger road and presumably lets them gain more speed for the uphills.  Perhaps they've all collaborated to mess with our minds, personally.  Any other guesses?

Another strange bit was the preponderance of ticks.  Now, I'm sure nine out of ten of you would have "Lyme disease" as your first word association, but  not to worry, these aren't deer ticks.  Nor, I suspect, do they carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Yellow Incandescent Paleolithic Fever, or whatever it is.  Just tons of the little...buggers.  We squished four on the side of the road within ten minutes.  It was very satisfying.  And then checked ourselves very very thoroughly for any that might have gotten through our defenses.  It was less satisfying, but necessary.  Ticks are gross.  I know how to get rid of 'em (paint 'em with nail polish! no, really - they'll suffocate if they stay with their heads burrowed in your body, so they back out), but that doesn't make me any more sanguine about the possibility of discovering one noshing in my armpit.  Yug.

I felt strong today.  It was cool.  It was a reasonably hilly day, nothing like some we've had in New York or Vermont (or even Ohio), but there were plenty of long hills.  And they just didn't...freak me.  Not like they would have a few weeks ago.  There was no part of me that looked up at a long ascent and quailed, cursing internally, nearing despair over and over again.  I just kinda took 'em in stride.  I almost never had to use my bottom gear, and I almost never even breathed hard enough to open my mouth.  I asked Molly, just to make sure, if the hills were less steep than in New York or if I'd gotten stronger, and she confirmed, it was me - that she wouldn't want to be going any faster than the pace I was setting uphill.  It's a really great feeling, to have biked 60 miles in a day (about 55 of them forward, 5 around town), with lots of hills, and say, "Ah, that was a nice, short day."

We ended our pleasantly short day in a lovely state park campground.  I would only that all states were honeycombed with such things, with well-kept up showers, laundry machines, etc, for the stately sum of seven bucks.  Plus electricity, 'cause we're in an RV spot, and we have a cable long enough to extend into the tent, which we didn't even plan, it just magically happened.  Hence, I'm recharging the computer as I type.  It just doesn't get better.  Well, okay, I suppose by some people's standards it might, but I'm happy.  It was a cool day with a nice tailbreeze, my butt didn't hurt much, my knee was happier 'cause I put back on the Neoprene knee brace 'cause the rash has gone away 'cause it's not hot...  Little things.  That's what makes it.

Oh, and one more thing.  The nice people with whom we'll be staying in a few days have graciously consented to let us use their house as a mail drop.  If you would love to send us little presents - very lightweight ones! - we have an addie for you.   If, y'know, you're totally inspired by our journey and absolutely must give us gifts to let us know so.  (We'd love white gas, but I suspect the post office wouldn't be so thrilled about it.)  I've tried to think of anything we're lacking that we really can't pick up out here, and the only thing that comes to mind is food.  Dried fruits are awesome.  Cherries, apricots, dates, pineapples.  Fruit & nut mix trail stuff is good, so long as it doesn't have chocolate.  Homemade cookies...  If you can get them there by Wednesday the, um, 2nd?, then have at it. :) Also "Nature's Grain" energy bars, which as far as I am aware can be gotten at Sam's club and possibly nowhere else.

Addie:
us
c/o Mike Williamson
2450 Ave. R.
Lyons, KS 67554

Have you ever seen Inherit the Wind?  Old movie about the Scopes monkey trial.  There's a bit in it where the reporter is offered, in quick succession, the opportunities to purchase a Bible and a hot dog.  His response: "Which is hungrier, my body or my soul?...  Give me the hot dog."

Today, I was offered salvation by a Jehovah's Witness and a bed and shower by a camp for Reorganized Latter Day Saints.  I chose to accept only one of these offers, with all due respect to the road less travelled.

It was another really good day.  It started off strangely, with the pilfering of our food stores by a wily raccoon kitten.  At least, that's what we think it was.  It made off with our apple and our PITA BREAD which is SO HARD TO FIND, DANGIT.  Meh.  I have to find the theft funny - the notion of a baby raccoon dragging away our snack bag is just so bizarre.  And it's a small price to pay, if we have to pay for our inability to anticipate situations properly.  At least he left us the cheese and some graham crackers, so we wouldn't starve this morning.  Then I made a call that I was very happy to make, to confirm that I've got a ride from Salt Lake City to Burning Man.  I'll need to show up a bit earlier than we'd planned on, which means we'll have to book it more than I'd have hoped for, but it's doable. And then I'll get to spend several more days at Burning Man and in the company of the extremely cool Chuck Nichols, who has pretty much volunteered himself body and soul to build the camp I'm part of there.  Then we set off in the rain.  It wasn't unpleasant rain.  Actually, it reminded me of Scotland, with the hills and the mist and the steady patter, the rain beading and trickling on my arms.

We soon came upon a little cafe, sitting in the middle of nowhere and serving up amazing pancakes.  We were happy enough about that, but it was even more fun when we became the targets of a game of round robin amongst all the other tables.  They all took turns at plying us with questions.  And they were much better, more interesting questions than we normally get.  Some of the people were experienced at camping, biking, and even stops along our planned  route!  We learned some of what to expect in Kansas, Colorado, and Utah.

Then, by the time we came out, it had stopped raining.  Threatened the rest of the day, but never made good, which was just about as excellent as you could ask - overcast, cool, with a tail wind.  Humid, which makes for a sticky shirt, but compared to what we had three days ago... I ain't complainin'.  We then found a bit of leisure reading left us by one of the people we'd been conversing with, The Watchtower, tucked into my bike rack.  I respectfully decline to change my relationship with god to that espoused by the Jehovah's Witnesses, especially given that god seems so much to have been with us this entire trip.  We get a lot of "good luck" and "god bless you" and such as we go, but the one comment that really spoke to me was a snippet of the Irish Blessing, a man telling us, "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back..."  May god hold you in the palm of his hand, it concludes, and given the number of tragedies and inconquerable problems we've had neatly averted by the kindness and generosity of those we've met, not to mention the great fortune to have my mother bringing us ice when necessary, I feel very much cradled by god.  Not babied, mind you, but watched over.

From there, it was a long day of biking over pleasantly hilly landscape in pleasantly overcast weather.  Can you believe I used the phrase "pleasantly hilly" in all seriousness just now?  No, really.  I actually enjoyed the hills.  They were never horrendously steep; some of them were very long, a mile or two, but it felt like a really nice challenge for my muscles.  Something to push against and celebrate at the top.  Molly's adjusted my seat a couple of times and she seems to have found a combination that works well for me - it's helping to alleviate what a friend of mine aptly labeled "creeping butt rash."  My foot behaved.  My shoulders behaved.  My breathing behaved.  My knees are whiny, and the Neoprene works only when it's quite cool out, but we'll deal with that problem when we come to it.  So, for most of the day, I felt really good.  Had a spot of weakness at one point, which is still inexplicable to me.  Anyone know?  I've experienced this walking at times, too.  No clue why.  Just suddenly feel drained, like I can just barely go through the motions.  It passes within half an hour, so I'm not too worried.

We found out, fifty-six miles into the day and twenty from our intended destination, that the motel at our intended destination had closed.  Argh!  We could have stayed there, but that would have made for another short day, two in a row, and we really can't afford that now.  We could have tried to make it to St. Joseph's, which was another fifteen or so further than we'd expected to go.  But we wouldn't really have had the sunlight for that (aside from it being a killer-long day), and with the shoulder conditions so variable and unpredictable, we wouldn't have been able to see problems in the pavement in advance.  Bad story.  Finally we decided to book it to Stewartsville, try to find a church or friendly household where we could camp and hopefully use the facilities, and if that failed, then continue on.  The booking it was actually fun.  It was easily the fastest I've ever ridden for that long.  Maybe 17, 18 mph?  No Lance Armstrong, yeah (who we just heard won the sprints with an average speed of 32 mph), but still respectable wth a 50-pound trailer.

We were just about to hit Stewartsville when we passed Farwesta, a camp for Reformed Latter Day Saints, discussed it briefly, and said, well, let's try it.  And to my surprise, the man to whom we talked (supervisor? caretaker?) was completely amenable to our request to pitch a tent.  "In fact," he said, "with y'all being so hot and sweaty, you could just not pitch a tent at all and go in there and take showers."  And beds.  And electricity.  For free!  It's almost the best of all worlds - that comes when we're invited into a stranger's home and shown the uncommon hospitality we've been shown thus far. But I will never ever complain about being offered a shower and bed.  (And it's only tonight that this could have happened - tomorrow more campers arrive to utilize the beds.)