A pleasant evening in or near Silverthorne, CO

Hey all. Today Paul and I cycled from an odd little campground near Heeney, CO to the bustling interstate town of Silverthorne. I had kind of a tough time in the morning, no doubt largely because of the complete lack of coffee. Heeney has a nice bar, which was great last night, but it didn't open until 11am and we didn't want to wait that long to get our morning coffee. Then of course there was a 28-mile stretch without any coffee sellers. We did find one small snack/bait shop open, but no coffee. Turns out graham crackers and Hershey bars are not a sufficient substitute.

This afternoon and evening we spent riding along a LOVely bike path from Silverthorne/Dillon over to Frisco and back. In Frisco we had dinner at a brew-pub pizza place, which was excellent. Really restored my faith in food. I'd been eating too many cheese/tortilla or peanut butter/tortilla things lately, and they just are not good any more.

Lyons, CO

Turns out Lyons Colorado has a coffee shop with a PC in it.

The ride here yesterday was beautiful. Only about 10 minutes of rain for a whole day of the cloud-based sun protection. The mountains are pretty, the road had a nice paved shoulder, drivers were aware. Little Lyons is a cute town, has a nice brew-pub with a great old video-game arcade. Tempest, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Asteroids, Tron, etc.

Yesterday was a standard 60-mile day, but we'll see about today. We're headed directly up into the mountains, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Heading into the mountains, sans laptop

Paul and I are about to head off into the mountains. Since we are taking camping gear for this leg, and I especially want to save weight for climbing mountain roads, I decided to leave my laptop here in Denver. I'll be back to pick it up before heading south to NM, but in the meantime I likely won't be posting to the blog here.

See you next Sunday!

Heading into the mountains, sans laptop

Paul and I are about to head off into the mountains. Since we are taking camping gear for this leg, and I especially want to save weight for climbing mountain roads, I decided to leave my laptop here in Denver. I'll be back to pick it up before heading south to NM, but in the meantime I likely won't be posting to the blog here.

See you next Sunday!

Hangin' in Denver

Today is Saturday, and in a few hours I will have been in Denver for a whole week. After staying with Dale and family in Littleton for several days I've shifted the burden over to friends Jen and Scott in Aurora.

I have now eaten at Watercourse Foods three times - lunches Wednesday through Friday - and I still love it. I can choose from the whole menu, it's all vegetarian, yay! I also hung out at a nice coffee shop called Penn Street Perk for hours, caffienating and using their free wireless. Once I stopped by my old favorite art gallery, Walker Fine Art. I used to live a few blocks from them, and I would often stop by to look at the art. I really like the style of sculpture she shows there. Lots of abstract metal work. It always inspires me to go home and get welding. Ever since I first went in there I've hoped that I could one day either afford to buy something or have some of my own work shown there. I think I'm a lot closer to the former than the latter so far. Maybe I can take some classes at The Crucible once I get out to the bay area.

Today Paul arrives from Pasadena and hopefully tomorrow we'll ride off into the mounains together. His return flight (from Denver) is Monday plus a week, and at that point I'll be heading south towards Albuquerque and Socorro. It's nice hanging out with friends, but I am itchy to get back on the bike.

For those of you I told about my numb-toe problems, I have now bought a set of insoles from an orthotics store in Aurora. The guy who helped me was very nice and combined and arranged some off-the-shelf products to help keep my feet in a healthier position. The custom-molded option apparently takes 3 weeks, and I'll be done riding by then. Hopefully these do the trick.

Limon to Littleton

The last day of the Chicago to Denver leg of my trip was a fun day and a tough day. 99.7 miles total for the day. This first photo shows a typical view from much of the non-Denver part of the ride. It was rainy for several hours in the morning, but then cleared up to give me a beautiful, if hilly, ride towards the big city.

Next is another typical landscape photo including a yellow flower. :) I really enjoy the landscape out here. More hilly, more trees, more variety than the plains.

Just outside Elizabeth Colorado I saw a Smart Car parked in a dealer's lot and I had to stop. It's funny, the guy sells giant RVs and tiny cars. I was only interested in the tiny cars. :)

He also had this electric tricycle. I thought this view was funny because you can't see the front wheel. In the US it's licensed as a motorcycle for some reason - perhaps a simpler process, or less stringent or something?

On my way into Denver, Dale helped me out by looking up local bike paths. He found bike paths such that most of the last 15 or 20 miles to his house were on protected bikeways. Sweet! However, these bike paths suffered from the standard bike path problem - they were designed with recreation in mind, not transportation. So it wiggled and swerved and curved all over the place while the road nearby went perfectly straight. I went a longer distance than I needed to, but the road had no shoulder so it was still a good trade-off I think. Besides, the path went through this great natural area near a creek, and I had an awesome tailwind. I was really flying through the curves, zipping around, having fun. On that section anyway.

At some point the bike path started following an interstate highway, and that interstate intersected with another one. The bike path went through a number of confusing twists and turns in order to stay with the original highway. I wonder when the bike path will be a high enough priority to warrant its own bridge straight through the tangle of roads?

It turns out that suburban Denver is a very large place. Even after this shot I probably still had over 15 miles to go to Dale's place, and he was relatively close to where I was coming from. It took a few more hours to arrive, and in the meantime I was beset by many more hills and two serious downpours. At one point near the end the lighting was getting pretty worryingly close. Finally as I was rolling down Dale's street the rain let up a bit. The garage door was open, I rolled my bike inside, and I was done!

They generously gave me a towel and some of Dale's dry clothes to replace the soaked ones I was wearing, and I could finally relax after 26 days on the road.

Eads to Limon, CO

I'm posting this from the comfort of my friend Dale's house in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. It's still easy to imagine the work that was involved in this day though. I wrote most of it right then, and I'm only now adding the photos.

The day started off beautifully, but ended as a fight with the wind.

The night before I talked with Dale, and it sounded like it would work out better if I arrived there earlier, and there is a more direct route from Eads to Denver than going to Pueblo first, as I had planned previously. So I said goodbye to Maggie and Dave and headed North. I was sad to leave them, they've been great travel partners, but the lure of arriving a day and a half early proved too great.

For the first few hours I had no wind, but as the day wore on it got stronger and stronger. For the first few hours of wind it was a crosswind, annoying me but not slowing me down. Then just 10 miles from Limon it turned straight against me and slowed me to about 5 or 6mph, making that last little bit take about 2 hours I guess. It definitely felt like a fight, but I just geared down and spun and stayed basically sane. I think I only shook my fist at the sky once.

Saw some cool stuff today - cactus, pronghorn antelope, cow skull, jackrabbits. I didn't take too many photos early on, but got into it later with some landscape and cloud pictures.

I had a nice experience in the morning in the tiny town of Wild Horse. It shows up as a dot on the map, but apparently only 9 people live there. The next town west of there was Hugo, over 30 miles away, and I wanted to refill my water bottles. After being rebuffed by some people working outside the "STUF SHOP" (a painted sign said "OPEN"), I tried at the US Post Office. It was a tiny little metal building, but inside was a very nice woman who told me all about the town, the post office business, etc. She gave me some of her own emergency drinking water after telling me that people in Wild Horse don't drink the tap water there because it seems to make people sick. So that was very nice of her. I then bought some stamps :) and went on my way.

I am super-psyched to be almost in Denver. Tomorrow night I'll prolly stay in Castle Rock, which is only about 20 miles from Dale's place. I might be able to keep going straight on to his house, but I don't know, that would bring the mileage from 67 up to 87 for tomorrow. Try it and see, I suppose.

Besides now being in cactus and sagebrush country, I have arrived in Green Chili country. Unfortunately for me, it is green-chili-with-pork country. In New Mexico people make green chili vegetarian by default, but in Colorado they put pork in it. So, I'll have to wait another day or two until I can go to the New Mexican restaurant in Denver. Hot green chile action awaits!

OK, pictures. This lovely tower was made of car or farm implement parts welded together. I think it was in the town of Hugo.

This repair shop was also in Hugo I think. The sign says "We Fix Everything, from daybreak to heartbreak". Doesn't look very open though. Glad I didn't need anything fixed.

I saw this broken bike safety flag on the side of the road while I was fighting the wind. Seemed like a creepy omen: someone else may have been fighting wind hard enough to break off their flag! If you look closely you can see that the non-flag end is splintered. Yikes.

This next cloud/landscape photo I took just to show a sample of what I was seeing most of the day. At least the clouds kept it from being too hot out. There were almost no crops to be seen today - the land was largely used for grazing.

Finally, I realized that my political views have been causing me to filter some very typical things out of my blog. This shows an old US flag flapping in the wind that someone fastened to a street sign way out in the middle of nowhere. Actually there were US flags all over the place all along my trip. I personally am not very proud of my country because of what our government is doing these days, so I tend to ignore such things.

Similarly, there were "support the troops" ribbon stickers on many many of the cars that I saw, and I sort of filtered them out as well. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge them or something, so I never took pictures.

Finally all across Kansas there were anti-abortion signs. "Stop abortion - Save the baby humans", some would say. I think one said "Some gifts only God can give" and it had a picture of a little baby. Every time I saw one of these I fantasized for the next half hour about retort signs to put up next to them. "Stop war - save the adult humans". Or "...Though a rapist can give a pretty similar gift." Pretty harsh I suppose, but it just goes to show how different my viewpoint is about the issue.

Anyway, I'm happy to be back in the big city for now.

Made it!

Whew! Last night I arrived at Dale's place in Littleton (part of the Denver metro area) around 6pm after riding 99.7 miles. So I still have never done a century in my life, and I continue to have great respect for people who do them. I was really blown.

I'll post photos later, but for now I'll summarize yesterday as: rain, hills, nice weather, hills, pasta, nice weather, hills, tailwind, rain, hills, rain, nice weather, hills, rain, scary thunderstorm, heavy rain, getting lost in Dale's neighborhood, then saw the "/." sticker on a minivan and I knew I had arrived. Hole lee cow! I can hardly believe I'm finally here.

Welcome to Colorado!

We have made it into Colorado! It turns out that much of Eastern Colorado looks a lot like much of Westen Kansas, but I guess that is to be expected.

We ran into a group of 6 cyclists from Britain (luckily no one was hurt) at a defunct gas station in Sheridan Lake. They are going from San Francisco to New York City. They had lots of dire-sounding descriptions of what's ahead for Maggie and Dave when they cross Nevada.

We passed this amazing field of sunflowers today, and Maggie had to have a photo of herself in the infinite expanse of yellow. It was a pretty cool sight, all those flowers. From a distance it looked all shimmery from the heat, so it was a shimmering yellow field. Notice that they are all facing the same direction.

Later in Colorado the plantscape changed again. Now we are often surrounded by sagebrush. It's pretty and smells nice and reminds me more and more of New Mexico. The further West I go, the more I feel at home.

We are staying the night in Eads, Colorado. We ate lunch at a little restaurant painted all purple.

According to the waitress at the Purple People Eater-E, we are still in "Cattle Country" so no veggie burger yet. (I'm so close to Denver I can almost taste the yumminess of Watercourse Foods vegetarian restaurant.) Anyway, she was nice enough to indulge my odd request of a sub sandwich with all the vegetables plus kidney beans. The homemade bread was very nice, I must say.

Today we rode 58 miles, and there were no services available the whole way. It worked out just fine, had enough water and foodstuff. The only thing that bugged me was that later in the ride there were no places to stop and rest in the shade. Not a tree in sight for miles at a time. Perhaps it would have been worth setting up a tent? Eh, I suppose not.

Kansas lives up to its name

Kansas really lived up to its name today. Apparently the name comes from the Kansa tribe which used to live here, which meant "people of the south wind". The wind came from the South all day while we rode West all day. It wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it takes more effort to keep the bike going straight with a side wind. The biggest factor, though, is that being on the North side of the road, the wake from the trucks passing us is blown toward us and hits us really hard. Strangely, we all noticed that the tanker trucks' wind hit us much harder than that from even the biggest box-style semis. Must be something about aerodynamics.

Early this morning, we passed this odd farm scene. At first it just appeared to be a junk yard or a storage area for a bunch of equipment. Then I noticed a goat standing on top of a pile of dirt, and I looked closer, and I saw that there was a herd of sheep scattered among the junk and equipment. I guess that's an efficient use of space or something.

Later I saw one of those high-rise tractor things in a dealer's yard, so I had to stop and see if I could ride under them. Answer: YES! So cool. Apparently they are sprayer trucks, and they have a big armature thing on each side that folds out for a total width of 120 feet! They have such a crazy high ground clearance so they can drive over full-height crops, probably like corn, without damaging them. Of course they are made to spray pesticides and chemical fertilizers, so they are probably not relevant to organic farming. Sigh. I guess I can save the $250,000 they cost.

This is a typical view we had after the cloud cover broke up today. Flat land, straight roads, strong winds, and a whole lot of sky.

I was really excited to see this Modoc sign, but then I realized the spelling I was looking for was "MODOK". Oh well, sounds the same.

Then finally, about 10 miles before our final city for the day, Tribune, we passed this lovely sign. So I am now in my destination time zone. Woo-HOO! So all you California people, I'm one hour closer to you today.

Tonight, thanks to Dave's persistence, we are sleeping in a local school gymnasium. We did check out the local motel, but the bed looked like it might have had bedbugs. Not for sure - I'm no expert - but I did find some suspicious signs when I looked at the bedding. After our bedbug experience in Chicago, I wanted to be really sure to avoid them.

I may be as few as 4 days from Denver, if my previous calculations are feasible. If it works out more like Dale suggests, it might be 6 or 7, and I'll spend next Tuesday in Colorado Springs riding the Cog Railway up Pikes Peak. That sounds like fun. Maybe I can visit Garden of the Gods too, that's a cool spot. I don't know how fast I'll be able to go from Pueblo up to Denver, because it's off the Adventure Cycling route maps and has really significant altitude changes.

Ness City to Scott City

Another day on the road with Maggie and Dave. They are pretty good travel partners, I have to say. Last night we shared a room at the "Derrick Inn" motel. When I saw the name in print I figured Derrick was some guy's name, but the photo shows otherwise.

This morning was really misty, and the sunrise was really gradual getting through all the clouds and fog. There were a bunch of oil well pump jacks visible through the mist. They looked pretty cool, slowly cycling away in the cool morning, making little animal-like creaks and groans as they turned.

This was an awesome vehicle, I thought. Gave me some great ideas for another KSR vehicle. I bet I could ride my bike underneath it. I didn't think to ask the guy to stop at the time, I'll have to wait for the next one I see (if any). I'd love to get a movie of one of those driving over me while I'm cycling too. Heh.

This afternoon we arrived in Scott City after 65 miles of riding, and found the local grocery store, city park, hostel, and library. I'm at the library even now using their wireless network. Hot wireless action is everywhere. Jeez, it's like we're in the 21st century or something.

I'm really enjoying travelling with other people. Makes me wonder if I was terribly lonely before. I guess not, really. But I do recall often thinking how great it would be to get back home to California. I haven't been thinking those thoughts as much since I hooked up with Dave and Maggie.

To Ness City with new friends

Friends! Today I met Maggie and Dave, who are riding from New York City to San Francisco together. Pretty cool. We rode together for about 30 miles and are even now sharing a motel room. Dave had the idea to try and stay in the local volunteer fire department, something he's done before, but upon investigation there was no place to get a shower, so we decided to go with the hotel that I had a reservation at.

This is a photo of Dave's foot. Guess what kind of shoes he rides in?

Maggie and Dave are doing similar daily mileage to me, so maybe we'll ride together for a while.

They are both independently blogging their trips, so as soon as I get their blog URLs I'll post them on the "links" thingy on the sidebar. heh. friggin' bloggers. :)

Sterling to Larned, KS

I find myself appreciating Kansas and the prarie landscape a lot more than I thought I would. There can be a lot of variety in prarie landscapes. I guess it is just commercial farming that makes the plains monotonous. This first shot shows how the flat prarie is naturally variegated. Different grasses and forbs (plants that aren't trees or grasses (new word for me!)) grow in a mix or in clusters, interspersed with the occasional tree or small stand of trees. The overall effect was quite beautiful, I thought.

These white papery flowers were very nice too. I suppose maybe they are a type of poppy?

I took this next photo to show these white-topped grasses. The seed-heads were stark white, which made a great contrast with the leaves and surrounding plants.

I even saw pelicans today! These white pelicans were flying over a salt marsh wilderness refuge. Actually all the photos today are from this refuge. Not all of the refuge is salt marsh though - in fact all these photos are from the prarie parts of it.

This bigger photo of the pelicans just looked cool with the clouds and sunbeams. Same birds.

I don't know what these last birds were, but there sure were a lot of them.

Today was not hot, unlike many days on this ride. The clouds you see in the photos were representative of much of the day's ride. Unfortunately they were accompanied by a near-constant strong wind. Not a perfect headwind, but even coming at me a bit less than 45 degrees from the side, it was enough to slow me down considerably. The side-load of the wind is also tiring in its own way, because it makes balancing take a lot more energy and attention.

I have realized on many mornings that if I was writing this diary at 7am every day, it would sound very different. At that time, I have spent an hour or two cycling in cool near-darkness and an hour or two in the sunrise, watching the landscape come alive around me. It really is a beautiful time to be out there. Every day though, by the time I arrive at my destination I have cycled a number of hours more, fighting wind or heat or traffic or hills or boredom, and those end up coloring my thoughts about the day much more than the early morning bliss. Anyway, it's nice that today I remembered the morning enough to write about it. I suppose those morning feelings are what really make this trip seem worth the trouble.

According to my calculations, I have 7 more days of cycling before I arrive in Denver. I will be glad to arrive somewhere familiar finally and not cycle much for a few days.

Hesston to Sterling, KS

The tractors of dawn. I saw this great line of combines and similar equipment in the early morning light in the field just by the road. They didn't look particularly disused, nor did they all look new. At other places I have seen obvious graveyards of farm equipment, but the status of these was not clear to me.

I also saw these camels and ostriches today. They were living at a place that I could have spent the night... "Hedrick's Exotic Animal Farm and Bed and Breakfast". Too bad they wanted $99/night or I might have gotten to pet a giraffe or something.

Restin' in Hesston

Today (Friday Aug 11) I'm resting at Lois and Ray Zehr's house in Hesston Kansas. They are old friends of my parents and have generously agreed to let me stay here two nights.

About a block away from their house is a lovely arboretum, and I walked around there for a few hours this morning. Their pond has a lot of fish and swimming turtles. Some kids came and were feeding the turtles, and there were easily twelve or more turtles swimming around us. Then after a long while, the great big granddaddy turtle showed its head. The head of this turtle was about 3 inches wide. I didn't get to see the whole body of the big one because he was kind of shy, but I'm guessing it was 2 feet across or more. Wow.

I also saw a tail of an animal that I never saw the body of. It was crawling off through some tall grass, and I just saw this thick black fleshy tail sliding away. Weird. Not furry, kind of bald. Too stubby to be a snake tail... looked first like must have been a great big lizard, but what lizard living there would have a tail where the base was 2 inches fat? Maybe an armadillo?

Lois cooked lunches for me, and the first dinner. This was very nice of her, especially because I'm vegetarian and she wasn't really familiar with vegetarian cooking. She asked what I ate, and one thing I mentioned was beans and rice. So she cooked up a big thing of that, and it was delicious. Then the first night I was there they (and by association I) were invited to a neighbor's place for some fresh fish specially brought from Virginia and cooked by a visitor of theirs. It's a good thing we brought the leftover beans and rice, because the side dishes with the fish consisted of rice cooked in chicken broth, plus fresh avocado and tomato. It did look delicious, and the fish-bringer (actually named Dan) seemed to be quite a skilled cook. Ah well.

For the next night I made a vegetarian lasagne-like casserole for Ray and Lois, which they seemed to like. That was a lot of fun - it seemed like forever since I had actually cooked real food. It sure will be nice to get home someday.

Cottonwood Falls to Hesston, KS

Today I stopped at a national tallgrass prarie preserve and looked around. I felt a little cheated because the grass was only about a foot high. Hardly "tall". I learned later that is normal for this time of year - the really tall grass doesn't grow up until later in the season. OK.

They also had displays of a bunch of old stuff... horse-drawn buggies, foot-powered grinding wheels, etc. Made me wonder how we would make those things differently if we had to make them today. I was imagining for example the buggy... instead of being made of lumber and forged iron, it could be built like a bicycle. It would have a lightweight chrome-moly steel frame, bicycle-style tension-spoked wheels, air-filled rubber tires, mesh-backed seats, a waterproof ripstop nylon canopy, sealed ball bearings, etc. I was thinking about a post-carbon world, of course. Before gasoline was used for everything, people used horses or their own muscles. But what if we went back to human or animal power but with modern manufacturing techniques? Seems like we could use some of the basic designs they used but make them much lighter, more comfortable, and more convenient. I can imagine a collapsible horse-drawn buggy, for example, that folds up when not in use. Hmm...

Saw this cool sign today. If that doesn't say "Dave, come visit us!" I don't know what would. Too bad it was 4.5 miles out of my way down a gravel road, or I surely would have visited them.

Finally arrived in Hesston, where my parents went to college.

Osage City to Cottonwood Falls, KS.

Got a late start this morning because I stayed up late (after 10pm!) talking to another guest at the b&b. He had long hair! First long-haired man I've seen for weeks. He was really into music and he had a laptop with a whole lot of music he liked, and we swapped and listened and talked about music. He was in town working for a company that paints water towers, so we talked about that too of course.

This morning I saw a badger cross the road. Long, low, pudgy-looking animal, with a sort of shovel-shaped head with obvious black-and-white markings on it. Why it crossed the road I don't know. :)

This evening I talked (but mostly listened) to one of the hotel owners where I'm staying. He is a talker, but very interesting and funny. He used to run a laundry service in Galveston Texas, he used to assemble big machinery, lots of stuff. Told me all about the hotelling and landlording and laundromatting businesses.

I'm a little chagrined that I always need to bow out of these conversations to go to bed because I have to get up early. Ah well, during the hot part of the day I know it's important.

Saw some fun stuff today. Another nice ad for dead animal flesh.


These three horses came running up to check me out as I passed.

Wow, please don't get me a job in the noxious weed warehouse!

I think stuff like this antenna tower is beautiful. Is it just me? I love the mathematical precision and the thin, spindly tautness of it.

I got passed by this house today. Freaked me out... I was cycling along near the right side of the right lane and a truck honked at me. Usually trucks just change lanes and go around me, so I looked back and saw this HOUSE bearing down on me. It took up all 3 lanes of that 2-lane road, so I rolled down into the grass and it basically went over me.

This is just a picture to give a flavor of the typical scenery I rode through today. It was soon after dawn, fairly cool out. Those hay bales are pretty big, maybe as tall as I am.

Osawatomie to Osage City

One thing Kansas is good for is sunrises. It's easy to see a big stretch of sky all at once, and the clouds are rarely totally absent or totally covering the sky.

This was a cool flower I saw today while I was on a fruitless detour. I wanted to avoid the scary road situation pictured below (65mph limit with no shoulder), so I took a side road that my Kansas map said should be paved, and found out after going about 10 miles out of my way that it wasn't all paved. Oy.

Later I saw a crop that I didn't recognize. Anyone know what it is? The leaves and stalks look like corn, but shorter plants and more leaves, and of course the tassle is replaced with a funky yellow flower bunch thing. Maybe sorghum?

After dinner at the local Mexican restaurant here, I was chatting with the waiter. At one point he asked if I was here on vacation (since I'd said I was from California) and I said yes. He said "You come to Osage City for vacation??" Hmm. Looking around the town, I can understand his perplexity. It, like almost all the towns I've stayed in, have been small farming communities. Each has a hotel, a bank, a "Casey's" chain gas station slash convenience store slash pizza restaurant, a Chinese food place and a Mexican food place. Of course there are lots of other things I don't notice much - feed stores, farm equipment dealers, etc. Just kind of made me stop and think.

Clinton to Osawatomie

Yesterday I rode from Clinton, Missouri to Osawatomie, Kansas. It was a nice ride, and especially nice to be back on hard pavement again. I started riding really early in the morning, about 4am. That meant I rode about an hour in the pitch dark, which was a little freaky. I have a 3-LED headlight on my bike, which is fine to see the way if there are no other lights around. There were often no other lights around. It was kind of cool to be able to star-gaze while cycling. I could just about make out where the Milky Way was before I'd start veering dangerously.

After that first hour, the sun very gradually brightened up my world. At first there is just a hint that something is different. Then I start seeing the lines on the road in places where my light isn't shining and seeing silhouettes of trees and cows and buildings. Eventually I turn off my headlight because I can see OK and want to save battery. Even at this point it is still at least an hour before I actually see the sun - all this light is just reflecting around in the sky above. It doesn't start getting noticeably hotter until the sun actually hits my back directly, and even then it takes a couple hours before it gets bad. By that time, I'm almost to my destination for the day.

This riding in the dark doesn't lend itself to lots of photographs, but I sure am happier riding during the cool part of the day.

If you click on this photo to look at the big version, you can see in the center that the road ahead of me is a long straight series of ups and downs. Lots of work.

In Osawatomie I bought a cheap mp3 player at a Radio Shack. I mean cheap in quality, not in price. Oh well, when's the next time I'm going to be in a town big enough to have a well-stocked modern electronic-doodad store? It's a discontinued model ("My Musix" brand), and I have already worked out its primary failing. It does not understand subdirectories! I'm using it with a 2Gig SD flash card, which represents about 600 songs, or 60 albums, give or take. That's a lot of files to have just in one big list. It's also a lot of songs to scroll through one-by-one to find the music you want to listen to. It's especially a lot of songs to scroll through when it does not know how to remember what it was playing when you turned it off.

All that aside, having music while I ride makes it a different trip. A better trip I think, definitely an easier one. Today I was struck by the surrealism of riding through countryside similar to that pictured above and listening to this. This means I miss (some of) the cicada sounds, the birds, the wind in the trees. It also means a lot of time flies by without me wondering what the hell I'm doing out there. You might think it means I don't hear cars coming up from behind me, but believe me it's hard to miss the sound of 60mph tires approaching on asphalt when you associate that sound with the possibility of sudden death. Besides, there is generally not much I can do... I already ride as close as I am comfortable to the edge of the road, and beyond that it is up to the driver to see me and avoid me.

Today I also started to use my little rear-view mirror which clips onto my glasses. It lets me see the cars and trucks approaching from behind, but all I can do is make sure I'm over to the right. I do tend to watch them approach up to the last second now, so I suppose I could dive off into the weeds if I noticed someone not avoiding me. It really adds an extra element of tension though, to be constantly aware of exactly where the cars are behind me. I don't know if it's a net benefit or not.