THREE STATES IN THREE DAYS;
JUST UNDER 216 MILES TOTAL
JUST UNDER 216 MILES TOTAL
Day 1: Late Start
Having closed Critical Mass the night before the Big Tour, I had a terrible time getting that mattress off my back on Saturday morning. I was under-rested all day Friday anyway, and after feeling like a zombie all day, tying one on until midnight was, to say the least, dumb.
Brian had no trouble getting up, and since he doesn't really care when he arrives someplace or whether he rides and pitches his tent in the dark, he occupied himself installing a new fender on his BOB trailer.
The original plan was for he and I to drive to Lincoln in a rented SUV and then ride back with Corinna, who'd ridden up the previous week. But I'd have had to take off work on Friday morning to go fetch the rental car; the rental and gas would cost me about $115 to $125; I wanted to check out Critical Mass; and on top of it all, expending the resources of renting and driving an SUV 250 miles so I could take a bike tour vacation seemed a false economy. Especially when that money could be invested in an excellent set of waterproof panniers to hang on my front rack.
When I commute, I try to get wheels under me by 6:00 a.m.; it allows me time to stop in Brookside for breakfast and get to work in time to change clothes and settle in by 8:00. So the theory was we'd be on the road by six to ride up to Big Lake, near Mound City. This would give us time to stop for meals, deal with mechanical issues, take lots of pictures and pitch our tent in daylight.
My lights aren't really adequate for riding in the country in the dark, so this was a great plan all the way around.
As I say, Brian didn't seem to care one way or the other: he doesn't have lights suitable for randonneuring into the night, but he has better than average night vision and knows no fear.
On the way out of town, I pointed out this power plant we could see in the distance. I said, That's the exhaust pipe on a Chevy Volt. See also light rail.
This was to be my first real tour. We rode to Smithville to camp back in February, but that's only 35 miles out, not really a full day of riding. This would be the whole Memorial Day weekend, carrying everything but what little groceries and meals we'd buy.
We hadn't gone far, but we hadn't eaten before we left, so Parkville was breakfast. Frank's wasn't a cheap breakfast, but it wasn't unreasonable and it was very good.
We were, I was told, the first bicycles to ever take advantage of the 'biker parking' at this joint near Weston we stopped at. On tour, most people ask you how far you've come from and where you're headed. The Weston folks took it in stride that we'd come from KCK that morning, though they probably thought we'd been on the road twice as long as we actually had since they did an honest-to-goodness double-take when we said Big Lake was our destination.
St. Joseph doesn't look that far on a map, but 70 miles in, stopping for a late lunch (technically it was supper time I guess), I felt like I'd really done some riding. My hands and wrists were killing me, more so than I would have expected, and once I had the excellent burger, onion rings and malt from Ford's Drive In in me, I was ready to camp.
Corinna actually sent me a text saying we should just camp at Lewis & Clark instead of trying to make Big Lake if we weren't any farther than we were, but we'd already passed that when I got the message. Cell coverage kind of comes and goes as you ride through the boondocks, so she may well have sent the message before we got that far.
There was a Warm Showers contact in St. Joseph, but we soldiered on and I got a second wind after we'd cleared some of the hilly stuff around there.
There was the gravel to deal with, however. Brian kept saying we needed to hurry to get through it before it got dark, and that was a program I could sign up for. I hate riding gravel to begin with.
A gravel road is made of the shit they're supposed to sweep off a proper road.
I don't like the flats that riding on gravel seems to generate (shards of flint working their way through the tire and piercing the inner tube), I detest hitting loose patches of it and having my wheels try to go out from under me, and I loathe the slow pace it dictates both from a control standpoint and a lack of traction.
That is just the short list of why I try to avoid gravel roads, and that's a list that applies to flat roads. These hills by Nodaway would be challenging for a fully loaded bike even if they were paved with something more like actual pavement.
Brian seemed to find these climbs amusing and told me I could really get going fast on the steep downhills on the other side. He doesn't really get my aversion to broken collarbones and road rash.
There must be some trick to climbing these or else my tires are wholly inadequate for the task.
My first attempt to attack one of these hills, my front wheel was coming up and when I leaned forward to compensate, the back wheel spun out. I awkwardly dismounted (my payload in back was higher than I could really get my leg to go, and when in civilized places I often climbed a park bench or at least a curb when getting on and off) and did the Walk of Shame to the top.
The second attack I tried, when I dug in there was a horrible sound and something locked up on my bike. I was sure it was a major mechanical something, and Brian seemed to think so too. He was telling me the only bike store between Kansas City and Omaha was back in St. Joe, but it turned out I'd just kicked my back wheel out of the frame. Surprising since I'm pretty sure the last person to have the back wheel off was the mechanic who overhauled my bike the week before, but once the axle was re-seated and the quick-connect tightened properly, I was able to do a second Walk of Shame.
The third hill, I just cut out the aggravating first step and walked it up. See also the fourth and I think there was even a fifth hump.
If there's anything I hate more than gravel roads, it's farm dogs charging me. I carry pepper spray specifically for them because ignorant hillbillies insist on their right to allow their feral mutts chase me. The hillbilly argument seems to go like this: The dogs are harmless, you're over-reacting if you think they'd bite you; but we can't leash or fence these animals because our safety, living in a remote area, depends upon these harmless puppies.
So imagine my delight as I travel down a gravel road to encounter a couple of these fluffy guardians. Brian did his usual, which is to stop and scream at them. This often works, I think mainly because the dogs want a moving target to chase. These two, though, continued the charge. I had my pepper spray in hand (I never seem to get to it in time, but I did this time), and when Brian said 'Go for it, Rod,' I let them have it.
He meant I should go for it and ride on while he screamed some more, but the spray worked. It looked like the stream crossed the snout of one of the dogs, but I think their main reaction was to a larger animal pissing a territorial marker. And that piss smelled more potent than theirs, I think.
I worried that some redneck in a pickup truck would come charging down the gravel road after us, and my general PTSD issues with dogs had me shaking anyway, but I guess the whole affair got my mind off bitching about the gravel.
Maybe it was the adrenaline of dealing with the dogs, maybe it was the excellence of that meal at Ford's, but once we got past the gravel and were back on flat, paved roads, I got a second wind. We had to jack with my limit screws a bit, my shifters never stay adjusted for long it seems, but mainly as the sun went down we just started riding harder.
Part of this was I wanted to get to camp, part of it was the mild headwinds we'd faced went down with the sun. But I think after Milne, we kept above 15 mph the whole way. I was standing up most of the way, in part to relieve the pain in my wrists and hands, in part because I was unaccountably saddle sore even for a long day on the bike.
This was only my third Century, and it was exhilarating to finish it strong. 108.5 miles and finished faster than we started. Corinna was waiting in camp with rotisserie chicken, fresh pineapple and I don't know what-all. She'd done a personal record herself, 135 miles from Lincoln. And we had two whole days to make it the rest of the way home.
There was some flooding at Big Lake, and the campground had been sold out but the camp host had set Corinna up in an overflow area with a shelter house where I could plug in my CPAP. The down side was the shelter was reserved the following morning and we needed to be gone by 8:00.
Day 2: ¡Hace Muy Viento!
I really wanted a shower before we started the second day, and the camp host wanted me to wait until the people who'd paid to camp there had a crack at it. I didn't realize Corinna had managed to talk her out of charging us the night before, since we didn't get a proper campsite. The camp fee is a lot to pay just to take a shower, but I probably would have if I thought it'd get me in there faster.
Instead we went and had breakfast first, then I showered. And then we got on our bikes and I first started to have an inkling that something was very wrong.
Getting outfitted for the trip, my bike had made some squeaking noises and the first diagnosis had been my adjustable stem was worn out. A replacement didn't quiet the bike much, and when I finally had it overhauled, the culprit turned out to be a bottom bracket cartridge so whipped you could see bearings through part of a housing they were supposed to be sealed into. That's why it sounded like a rusty bed spring when I pushed the left pedal.
The replacement stem was a fixed, forged single piece, the theory being that the adjustable joint had just been torn apart by me yanking on it and leaning on it for 5,000 miles. A nice theory, but the kid at the bike shop ordered one based mainly on the height I had my old stem adjusted to, and what I didn't realize until I was 108 miles from home and injured by it, was the length and angle of this stem altered the fit of my bike in pretty dramatic ways.
The handlebars were at least two inches further forward, a difference that isn't noticeable on your daily commute but is disastrous when you spend eleven hours riding to Big Lake.
Still, only one way home. Actually, at breakfast, I convinced Corinna and Brian to try a different route back. Those gravel hills at Nodaway, I said I would literally do almost anything to avoid ever riding those again.
I would consider an extra 30 or 50 miles of pavement if that's what it took to go around that stuff. I wasn't exaggerating and we did have two days to get back.
So we rode over to Rulo, which got me a third state for the tour (so far I'd only been in Missouri and Kansas), where we saw even more Missouri River flooding. People were fording to the little islands their riverfront homes had become to retrieve personal belongings.
The road had promised to be gravel, Brian and Corinna assured me when we'd looked at the map over breakfast, but it was paved even through a complex of Indian reservations and became K-7 once we were back in Kansas.
It followed the flooded river and was almost perfectly flat. It was my kind of road, especially for being incredibly sore and still a bit tired from Saturday.
We had a headwind, a very pronounced headwind, and I tried with some success to tuck in behind Corinna. I'd done this some late Saturday, trying to draft behind Brian's trailer, and I think it helps just with the wind that grabs the front panniers.
We got to White Cloud and went up to see the observation deck where you can view parts of four states.
It's quite a climb from the highway, which basically hugs the river, to the Four States Lookout. I was contemplating whether it'd be worth it to ride to the top, and a descending motorcycle told me it was, but it was gravel at the top. I didn't need my bike up there, just my camera, so I parked the bike and hiked the rest of the way.
Corinna and Brian rode it even though they didn't need their bikes at the top either.
What I could see from White Cloud, besides corners of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska is that the corn farmers in the valley bottoms would have been well advised to plant rice this year. Or maybe to not plant at all, just take their seed to higher ground and sit this one out.
The headwinds were, if anything, getting stiffer after White Cloud and I tried more vigilantly to draft off Corinna. The bike fit issues were really getting to me, too, but at least I hadn't had to ride any gravel.
Corinna had laughed when I described the gravel near Nodaway as a 'minimum maintenance road.' She said, 'We should get you out on a real minimum maintenance road.'
She pointed one of these out as we got near this old stone barn. 'That,' she said, 'is a minimum maintenance road.'
No, I said. Roads are built. And they have names. What she was pointing to was just a place where a few pickups had made muddy ruts in the grass, not really a road at all.
It got harder to stay on Corinna's tail, something I attributed to the winds getting worse. But by the time we got to Sparks, she accurately diagnosed me: I'd bonked. She and Brian had eaten in White Cloud, but I still felt full from breakfast.
She knew I was suffering from the bike fit, and kept slowing down to try and keep me drafting but while I thought I was riding harder and harder, she said I was going slower and slower.
I ate some energy bars there in Sparks and Brian was waiting around the corner at the next informal looking sort of town with lunch. I did feel a lot better after I'd eaten, not sure if I ever got back to 100% the rest of the day but I was definitely better.
As we got closer to Atchison, besides wind, we had long, rolling hills to climb. If the winds were 25 mph, they were probably a little less, 15-20 in the depressions, and then when you got to the top, a mile or so later, you were greeted with 30-40 mph winds. It was like being bitch-slapped by God, 'I told you to go NORTH!'
The 25-30 mph figure was official, I thought they were more than that based on the noise. No, I was told, you're hearing the wind-speed plus your speed, so you have to add your 10 miles per hour to the figure.
But I wasn't adding 10 mph, I was adding more like four.
We did see a farm with bison and longhorn cattle, but what I mainly remember from Sunday afternoon was the relentless winds. All day Saturday, Brian had been telling me the forecast was for brutal headwinds on Sunday and even worse ones on Monday, and he seemed delighted that the forecast had been accurate.
It was predicted! He said this gleefully, as if he'd feared that the weathermen would get it wrong and he would be deprived of the experience of fighting for every inch of road.
We got buzzed by a bus, too. Rare, most of the drivers were going out of their way, clear in the other lane, to pass us. And a bus, you figure that's usually driven by a professional. I didn't see a logo on it, it may have been a private RV, you see those converted from charter-type buses every now and then. It was white, and I can't prove it wasn't a Sky Express, so maybe we were lucky not to end up in the fucker's wheel-wells.
I schemed in my head stumbling upon this bus in Atchison and slashing its tires. Or better yet, siphoning out its gas and setting the whole thing ablaze. I've been re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces lately, and I have to say I think Ignatius' rants against the evils of Greyhound Scenicruisers may have more merit than I'd previously considered.
We agreed that when we got to Atchison, it was incumbent on us to find ice cream. This is why you don't loose weight touring; it's easy to put back what the road takes out, with interest, when you eat enormous bacon-and-egg breakfasts, gobble pineapple, oranges, bananas and strawberries, inhale bread and pastry, guzzle Gatorade and stop for ice cream before heading to camp to cook a big supper.
All of which is, by the way, absolutely necessary. One little gap in the consumption schedule had almost sidelined me before we even got to the hills.
Once we got to Atchison's downtown (which was dramatically downhill as you go south; I feared that we'd discover we were going the wrong way and have to climb back up), I spotted two things I wanted worse than anything in the world: Sonic and a Super 8.
I couldn't really afford a motel, but I also really didn't give a shit what I could afford. Three blocks of riding and I could be sleeping in an air conditioned room on a bed with a toilet and shower nearby. And a noon checkout, no fear of a camp host rousting us at the ungodly early hour of 8:00 am.
Instead, we found and Alps that was about to close and got groceries for camping, then found the most awesome little ice cream shop, Snowball Ice Cream. This joint isn't simply better than Sonic, it's probably one of the best ice cream shops I've ever visited. We got there just in time, too, we had our stuff right before a twenty-person line formed that didn't abate for the half hour or so we were there.
Brian was unafraid of ruining his appetite for dinner and had a large malt, a whopping quart that only cost $5.25; I settled for the diminutive 22 ouncer; Corinna got a Sundae large enough to sink a ship and had to have Brian's help finishing it.
Then it was off, over the scariest looking bridge I've ever ridden across, to the Lewis & Clark State Park to camp. I didn't get pictures of this bridge because, well, it was too scary. Two narrow lanes, the riding surface being made of a lacework of iron grates and crumbling concrete with seams that appear ready to shred a bicycle tire. You can see the over-full Missouri River through most of this while cars did their best to give us a wide berth in a space that didn't really allow for it.
A replacement bridge, modern, wide and made of stout stuff, is being built right next to this. I hope it's finished before I try to cross the Missouri River on US 59 again.
I was worried when we got to the campground that it would be sold out, and it did appear full to the brim from the road. At which point, I had a little meltdown. The ice cream had lifted me from the pits of despair but after a few more miles of headwind the prospect of not even finding a place to camp was more than I could cope with.
Corinna tried to lighten me up, laughing and telling me I could surely charm the camp host into helping us out. And pointing out the beautiful sunset I was missing the chance to photograph.
I don't want to take a fucking picture, I said. Besides melting down, I couldn't help but think that if we'd gone to the Super 8...
I'd tried from White Cloud to call in a reservation only to find out I wasn't far enough in advance to do so. I had left a message on the machine at the campground in hopes that it would help, but according to the guy at the state's 877 number I should have done that three days earlier.
Anyway, it turned out there were plenty of sites left, and while he took my money for the site fee and the firewood we bought, the camp host told me, 'The way it works with Missouri State Parks, folks show up on bicycles we're supposed to accommodate them somehow if we physically can. I had thirty or so show up one time when we were sold out, I gave them the area by where we store firewood and just charged them one site fee for the lot of them.'
This was good to know; and whoever the bike advocate who got that sort of policy, however informal, to be in force, I'll buy you a beer anytime.
We'd done 62 miles in harsh headwinds; besides my injuries related to bike fit, that 62 cost me way more than Saturday's 108 had. I averaged 11 mph going KCK to Big Lake, and despite working harder on Sunday, my average was a mere 9 mph. That 18% difference in speed may not sound like much, but it's huge.
For that matter, I managed not to get any cramps on Saturday, but after I got in the Two Pygmy Tent on Sunday night I had hamstring cramps I had to kind of ride out because to maneuver out of the tent to walk them off would have meant making them worse by bending things the wrong way. So I guzzled Gatorade and wept for the choices I'd made in life.
Day 3: I'll Give You Something to Cry About
God evidently heard me whining about the headwinds we'd faced on Sunday and decided I wasn't sufficiently grateful. This is, after all, how I chose to spend my vacation, my holiday weekend, one of my six weekends a year I have to basically do whatever I want free of work and family responsibilities.
You know when you stick your head out the car window on the highway? Imagine that kind of wind on your whole body, your bike, your panniers.
We rode out of Lewis & Clark State Park (those two camped everywhere, we never saw anything this whole trip they hadn't staked out at some point) into 40 mph winds with 60 mph gusts.
Standing on it, riding as hard as I could in my granny gear I looked down to see I was eating up Highway 45 at a whopping four miles per hour.
We didn't need a bike lane, we needed a bike tunnel. If we'd decided to go north we could have made it to North Dakota before dark without pedaling.
This was by far the shortest leg of the tour, 45 miles, but it felt like the longest. The bike fit issues, the wind, all this accumulated and made me fantasize about throwing my bike in the ditch and hitchhiking home. What's the worst that could happen? Kidnapped into a weird religious cult? Would that be worse than grinding out the rest of these miles?
I haven't yet designed a spoke card commemorating this trip, but I have decided it should have as its central graphic element a pacifier.
Not just because I chose to take the trip, but because even as I suffered, I knew that once it was over what I'd mainly remember was the cool things we saw and I'd be fully licensed to beat my chest and boast about riding through the worst headwinds ever.
Even Brian, who always seems to have experienced something worse or bigger or harder than whatever he's up against, by lunch, admitted that they were the worst winds he'd ever had to ride into. He still seemed to see this as a good thing, so maybe he's learned to skip the self-pity step and go straight to basking in the glory.
We had lunch in Weston, then took a gravel detour I would have voted against but which turned out to be a winner. It bypassed about four long hills, and as gravel roads go wasn't too shitty. The rocks were relatively fine and well packed, no loose piles to throw you; it was fairly flat and generally sheltered from the wind by trees and hillside.
Despite the surface, it may have been the most pleasant miles we rode on Monday.
After we got back to the highway, the winds were more of a crosswind. This should have made me feel better than it did, a crosswind is far less exhausting and far less slowing than a headwind, but I'd got it in my head that the winds were south-westerly enough that they'd actually become a bit of a tailwind when we turned at Weston.
There was no tailwind, and something inside me died. By the time we were on Corinna's 'bike & hike' shortcut over the tracks to get to the Fairfax Bridge, I had lost all perspective.
On a good day, getting on the Fairfax Bridge to go south over the river would piss me off. Thing is, it's really only got highway access from that side, so you end up having to carry the bikes up a steep embankment to get to the road. At the end of my rope as I was, it seemed like an all-out humanitarian crisis.
The alternative is to ride all the way over to the Heart of America Bridge and backtrack, something I'd have seriously considered doing if I hadn't been in so much pain.
The winds were bad, but I blame the bike fit issues for at least 75% of what was not fun about this trip. Two weeks later, my wrists are still not back to 100%, though I have put my old stem back on the bike and it's no longer aggravating things directly.
I've found that my legs are stronger, I do more sprinting on my commutes and make moderately better time. The waterproof panniers I had up front for the trip, what I spent the rental car money on, are now my daily drivers, and they are awesome.
I'm definitely going touring again, though I hope before I do to get a smaller sleeping bag (more compressible) and a bigger tent.
Maybe I should hang a pacifier off my handlebars where it's handy the next time I ride my ass out into the country and then feel sorry for myself on the way back.
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