Day Thirty Two

Well, we made some mistakes today. We rode 62 miles from Newton, KS to Arlington, KS.

We woke up in the middle of a car show. When I awoke, there was only about 3 cars there, but they started fillig in quickly. We eventually ended up chatting with one of the guys, and he was really very nice.

In the middle of the night I awoke to see another cyclist roll into our park. I'm not sure exactly what time, but it was sometime between 12 and 3 am. This poor guy slept in later than us, and awoke to a ton of cars. Hah. We didn't know whether we should wake him or not, but it all worked out. We talked to him a bit, mostly to see where he stayed the night before. Apparently he'd ridden through the night. I think that he was living further off of the grid than we were. We ran into him again in town, and we got water together and said our goodbyes. We never did get his name, so we refer to him by any number of fictional names.

It was hot again. I won't expand on that. It was really windy again. Such is life. After talking to Arnold, we got the idea that we wanted to ride into the night to avoid the heat. So that was our plan.

Jason apparently had some family in Hutchinson that he'd all but forgotten about. So, when we got there, we got there address and headed over. Jason hadn't seen Trenda since he was three, so we were basically hanging out at a strangers house. We're not even totally sure how they're related, but third cousin is what Jason decided on. She was very nice though, and we were very grateful. We got lunch and did our laundry, and got to have a shower. Then we just sat around in the AC and watched High School Musical. Eventually we headed out.

We stopped in Arlington for dinner, beforeour night ride. We ate at the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was awesome. It was owned by this couple with 8 kids, and they were great. We got excellent Philly cheese steaks.

After dinner, we went next door to buy some fireworks. There were a bunch of kids outside who were pumped about our trip. They ended up giving us 15$. Now, we truly were going to buy fireworks regardless, so we didn't feel too badly about using that money for our purchases. So we strapped the explosives to our bikes and headed off.

We realized within 5 minutes that we had had a terrible plan. Riding at night is hard, and not fun. So after assessing the situation we rode the half mile back into town and stayed at a park. Oh well, we should have known it was a bad plan. We're bummed that we missed miles in the afternoon waiting to ride at night, but life goes on.

Tomorrow: Somewhere down Rt. 54.