Seeing that wireless internet is as far and few between as the towns out here, I'm going to take this chance to skip a few towns and play catch up with my whereabouts. I'll start in Ness City, Kansas and talk on my trip into Kansas in a later post.
By the time I got into Ness City, I had been rolling through a two day head wind. Needless to say, I was exhausted and ready to fall in for the night, right after I found something to eat. I stopped in the nearest and only restaurant and took a load off my feet and ate upon the provisions of the short-lived town. When I had finished and walked out to my bicycle, I found the rear tire had gone flat. I wasn't surprised seeing that it had seemed low for the past one hundred miles or so; and I'm not saying that I didn't try to air it up, it's just I had assumed the weight I was carrying was taking a toll on the tire and tube and thought nothing of it, trudging along as best I could on low pressure. And I had to deal with the fact that three times already when trying to air up my low pressure, I pulled the valve right out of the tube, causing a gash that was far from repairable. So, at this point, I realized that the flat was inevitable and long overdue and I was glad that it happened in town and only walking distance from the hotel; though, I had planned to camp at the park which was more riding distance of which I was out of luck in doing.
I walked my bike over to the Ness City Motel, which from the inside, looks nice and stable. I waited for a moment before the lady came to the front desk to check me in. She was somewhere in her early fifties and she was short and stalky with a wondering eye; not that her wondering eye has anything to do with her character, I'm just keeping the description at full mast. Heck, I have a wondering eye; it's just that my other one is lazy so they cancel each other out. To set up the conversation, a few of the guests were calling in about the cable not working. So, before I went up to my room, I made some smart remark about whether or not the cable was working. We had a good laugh and I told her it wouldn't matter because I don't watch too much television. She was aghast.
"You don't watch T.V.?" she asked with her mouth hanging open like one of those fun house entrances at a circus.
"No. Not a whole lot. On occasion, I do," I responded.
"Not even to watch Twilight?" she asked as though I hadn't said anything. At that point, she was either being sarcastic or for real. I really couldn't tell which because she started out sarcastic and could have switched over being that she had one of those exciting and unpredictable personalities. So, I walked in the open door.
"You're a Twilight fan then?"
"Oh yes," she said with gusto! "It's one of the best romance stories out there."
"Really?" I asked.
"I don't go to the theaters for anything; but I can't wait 'til November when the new one comes out. I'll be camped out on the front steps the night before."
This lady was a hoot and I had to get out before the gettin' got goin' without me holding on. I thanked her for her time and she told me where to put my bike and I unpacked and settled in my room, which is where I got the scoop on what forty-five dollars a night gets you. I'm not going to go into detail about complaints or anything since it was a bed and a shower and I can't complain about that when I could have been sleeping in my own sweat which I had done a few nights so far on my trip out here.
Before I pulled in under the blankets, I found the hole in my tube that had been giving off a super slow leak in my air pressure. I patched it up and laid it out. Sleep overcame me.
The next morning, I got everything together and the rear wheel back onto the bike, pumped and ready to go. After I pulled all of my luggage down to the bike and prepared the now all-too-familiar routine, I found the tire had deflated a little bit. So, I took the tube back out and patched what I thought might be other problem areas. Getting the whole package wrapped up and ready to go, I had breakfast and headed east into the wind that was still howling in my face with a slight cross to the south.
As I rode out of town, I found that the three patches I had so tediously applied did nothing but provide an image of me knowing what I was doing. The tire still seemed low, so I stopped occasionally to air it up, but to no avail. The last time that I tried to give it a little pep-pump was truly the last time. I pulled the pump off and did it again. I ripped the valve from the tube. I threw the pump down and had a few words with it. I don't feel like it understood me. It just sat there amidst the rocks, looking off into the wind, wishing it had that kind of force to better aid me in my quest to get anywhere.
At that point, without any spares or anywhere close to get them, I knew I had to make it to Great Bend, Kansas where a friend from home had made some inquiries and found that there was a bicycle shop located there. It was sixty miles to Great Bend and I knew I would have to get a ride there somehow, but I wasn't going to sit in the one spot and try to get somewhere because the only way to get somewhere is to get there and one can't get anywhere sitting in one spot. So, I started walking my bike, or half a bike, toward Great Bend, turning to stick out my thumb to any passing truck that would be able to haul my vehicle. About two miles down the road, a truck was kind enough to stop in front of me. As I approached, he was already opening his bed and asking me where I was going. I asked him first so that I wasn't taking him too far out of his way. He was heading east. I was heading to Great Bend. He was going through Great Bend. Great!
Forty miles hasn't gone by so fast for me in so long as that drive did. We talked about bicycles and about what he did. Come to find out, he was a teacher and for the past three summers, around this time, he worked for a firework company that set up those tents and thrived off of those and the stores they owned. Apparently, it was a multi-million dollar business and had up to six hundred tents, each employee such as himself in charge of ten to twelve tents at a time. The whole system was really intriguing and I would have never given those tents another thought on how they were ran until he started giving me the scoop. The people you meet.
He dropped me off at the bicycle shop where I unloaded my luggage and took my bike in. Todd, the young man running the Golden Belt Bicycle Shop, was a huge help in letting me use his stand after I told him that I had just returned from Barnett's. He had gone there a couple of years ago, so we had a good time talking a little bit about bikes and such things. I put my bike up in the stand and gave my new rear tube and tire proper air pressure including my front one which had been running just as low; we will not discuss how low I was riding them seeing that the irony between me coming from a bicycle mechanic school and the situation I had gotten myself into with tubes, of all things, was too much for me to bear.
After fixing myself up for the next leg of my journey and seeing that I hadn't gotten any riding in that day, I decided to ride south to Highway 19, which would take me east on NE 140th Ave. When I came to the eastbound road, I found it to be very desolate as far as traffic goes and that's only because even driving a car on that road would give you a headache. As pretty and quiet as it was out there, the road was a bit mangled and proved to be a rough ride. Since I had started out late, I had decided to camp somewhere between where I was and Nickerson. But, since I had lost an hour in entering Kansas and the days were longer, I had a lot more sunlight to get me through to Sterling, just north of Nickerson and the closer of the two when it came down to the sun setting. And when the sun sets in Kansas over stretches of grain fields, the colors of the sky come out in true form. The setting sun sneaking away behind some stretched clouds in the west shining on the cotton-ball clouds in the east and coloring them in with numerous shades of pink, purple, and orange just over a bottom layer of blue-gray that added to the mysticism swirling in the sky, bidding me Goodnight as I made my way over the Arkansas River and into the little town of Sterling.
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