After leaving Olney Springs, I knew I had a long stretch of nothing in between there and Eads, Colorado, where I planned on staying for the night. I started out and rode through more of the sand and dust that I'd been taking in since Pueblo. I stopped in Sugar City which isn't as sweet as you might think; unless the sand was sugar itself, I don't think there's much to munch on there. I left Sugar City and made my way through more desert on a road that had been running parallel to the railroad tracks where I'd been waiting for a train to pass so I could feel like a real traveler riding alongside the train and the conductor waving at me, tooting his horn to spur me on further. I soon came to the assumption that there hadn't been a train on that track for ages or that I might have just been in the area at the wrong time.
Getting hungry around one to two o'clock, I decided to stop at a rest area to cook up some purple whole peas and rice on my stove. The town, or collection of a couple of houses, was called Arlington. As I was getting my food ready, a truck pulled up and asked the usual questions to which I gave to usual response. The lady in the passenger seat stepped out to talk with me longer after the gentleman left. Kathy Anderson is a little old lady who lives in the house just across from the rest area. She put it together for the cyclists that came through, seeing that us cyclists have to be the only exciting thing coming through there apart from keeping up with the cows. She acted like a tour guide and gave me a run down on the area and how she was a fourth generation cattle rancher and pointed out where her nephew lived and her neighbors and the school house that was no longer a school house and hadn't been since 1963. She told me how the roads were formed by men in wagons and it was curved because "all they were carrying for supplies were three barrels of moonshine" and she said this with a laugh at the end in a real quick manner as though she'd said that line a thousand times before and the only person who laughed at it now was her because she was the only one who could keep up with her speech. I concluded, after she had left me to my food which I had been glancing at from time to time, that she was the tour guide of nothing, which, in my opinion, is a hard feat to pull off; but, she did it with pizzazz.
I made the last track to Eads and let me tell you, I was so happy to make it there after traveling on that road. It wasn't heavily traveled, but there was a bump ever six feet and by the time I checked in, I felt like what an older Jimmy Stewart often looked like: an old, tired basset hound who had been dragging his rear end through a field of rocks all day. I settled in and had dinner, where I was excited about some pie but found out that they pre-whip all of their homemade pies. . .who does that? They could have sold me a pie if they didn't do something so silly. Oh well.
Leaving Eads, I found that the winds started to pick up and I was dealing with a pretty heavy crosswind for most of the way to this point and the gust had only gotten stronger the next morning. Making my way to Sheridan Lake, my last stopping town in Colorado, I became accustomed to trying to adapt to the crosswind. As much as it might want to blow you into the next county, you have to try and find a median on the road by leaning into the wind very slightly; however, then you run into the problem with the wind stopping for just a moment and you find yourself over-compensating on your lean and almost run off or more into the road. So, in all, it take a little time and finesse to train yourself to tackle the kind of wind that makes you feel like you might be carrying three barrels of moonshine on your bike rather than your luggage.
I stopped at the Sheridan Lake gas station and was looking for the bicycle shop that the map had informed me that lay somewhere in the area. I asked the attendant and she pointed behind me to an aisle and stated that they sell a couple of tubes and a pump and that was their shop. Disappointed and discouraged about what other shops lay ahead of me, I sat outside the station and relaxed in the shade. At this point, three cyclists pulled up bearing nothing but themselves and water bottles. I found out that they were from Canada and were clocking one hundred and twenty miles a day. At first, I thought they were crazy seeing that they didn't have any provisions but soon found out that they had a support RV behind them. I think I would hate having a support car in that I would have more readily available to me an escape from my exhaustion and just hop on in and drive to the next town. They might not have been that weak, but I think I would give in at some point and take a nice drive.
I began to leave and we all looked behind us at the looming, building black cloud coming toward us. I decided to go and try and beat it and deal with the few drops that I might get on the way into Kansas. I rode down the road, expecting them to pass me at any point but never found them. I guessed they stayed behind seeing that the rain started to fall. I rode through the rain where it picked up in a couple of spots and died back down. I felt pretty good about making it through without too much damage.
At the border, I stepped off of my bike and took a picture of the "Welcome to Kansas" sign so I could send it off to a few friends to mark my progress and triumph of finally making it out of the desert alive and pedaling. As soon as I pushed the 'send' button, the sky opened up and the bottom fell out. Golf ball sized hail started pelting down on me and the bike. I tried to ride a few feet before the hail thickened and I couldn't even see in front of my face. I pulled over and teepeed my bike over me and waited for the punches to subside. Eventually, after a long five minutes, it stopped and I stood up not able to believe what had just happened. I immediately wanted to take back the action of taking a picture of my crossing over into Kansas. I apologized to the state and went on, hoping that Kansas had forgiven me for documenting its insides. I rode for Tribune, the next town on my overnight agenda and held my head down against the wind, stabilizing each mile as it slowly passed by.
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