Great start to week 3

Today is the first day of my 3rd week on the road! Time flies in retrospect.

Let me start with the flat land. I've hit the holy grail, the beauty of all beauties in bike riding: slightly downward sloping, flat roads. This morning I biked to Kearney, NE from Grand Island (~45 miles, including riding from the park), in about 3 or 4 hours, including a half hour break. I can keep a 20mph pace on this road steadily, and comfortably. It's amazing.

So, as you can tell the ride this morning was great. In fact, it was slightly magical, starting with last night. (Just to give you a sense of how great flat lands are-) I did about 90 or so miles yesterday, and I was heading to Mormon State Park, but I couldn't see any road markers for it, and instead found a county park I rode into. It was 9:30, and the park closed at 9, so there was no one around, no cars outside- but, they had a campground. So I roll in, and lo and behold, there was a tent. I think to myself- "wait, there were no cars out there, I thought I was alone". I make a few steps forward, and what do I see- A LOADED TOURING BIKE!!! I did not expect to run into another tourer on this route I've picked, let alone in a random tiny county park. It was like seeing a human for the first time as a castaway. Unfortunately, said person was already in their tent sleeping. I poked around a bit excitedly, and decided I'd wait until (today) to talk to them. Then, I wondered, "Do I want to talk to them? This could be a moment where I meet a fellow tourer- maybe they're headed to San Fran and we'll bike together!; but on the other hand, what if they're annoying or weird, and I'd be stuck with them all the way to San Francisco...". I resolved to chat with them in the morning regardless. BUT, I woke up at 6am, and they were gone:( It was like I met a fairy at night, and it disappeared, lol. What makes it worse is that they probably didn't know they had a fellow bike tourer there because I covered my bike and my things in my brown tarp because it looked like it might be thunder-storming that night. O well, maybe we'll meet again...

Anyways, the magic continued in the morning. Besides the amazing flatness, Highway 30, which I'm taking, parallels a railroad track. I had a great moment when a Union Pacific train caught up with me at about 40 miles an hour when I was going 20 (so it wasn't a fast catch up). It felt like a great beast was howling at me and slowly approaching. Then we rode side by side for about what seemed 10 seconds before it passed on, and I watched all the graffitied train cars pass by. I tried to keep up to it like to a whale in the sea, but it passed on. There were lots of other trains that passed me this morning as well. Most coming from the West are carrying coal (probably from Wyoming). I love trains, I really do. O, I also got a wave and a whistle from a train operator on another passing train going east as well.

On my way into Kearney, I noticed a Cabela's store (for those of you that don't know, it's "the world's foremost outdoor outfitter"). It's basically an REI for hunters. I stopped there and roamed around inside for a bit, and ultimately bought myself a new tent. I got a pretty cheap bivvy tent ($40- cheap goes both ways, it's not a great material as far as tents go). But it'll be a roof over me now, rather than my current bivvy's literal "roof over your head" where the rest of my body is covered in plastic tarp material. At least now I'll have a real shelter and place to move around. It also has mesh doors, so hopefully it won't get hot and stuffy like the bivvy. It weighs about 3.5 pounds, the current bivvy I have weighs about 2. I'm going to stop at the post office after this to ship back the old bivvy and some other things. I hope to cut my pack weight, or at least space use, by half. For those of you from home reading this, don't open the box when you get it. It's going to smell bad. I warned you.

After Cabela's I found a bike shop. Doing a google search, Kearney's bike shop is one of the last West of here. I don't think there are any in Wyoming as far as I could tell. I came to get a new chainring, new tubes, patch kit, and a spoke. The Bike Shack was AWESOME. I regret not getting the names of the two people working there (Casey?), but they were super helpful and inviting. They found me a 42 tooth chain ring and gave it to me for free, and they were all around awesome. Haha, I also found something called "HALT". It's a dog spray. Preparing for this trip, I read bike tourers talking about dogs chasing them, and I was a little surprised. They recommended branding a stick, haha. WELL, yesterday, I had my first dog chase. People let their dogs free in the yards in the country, so I was chased by a young bull dog for about half a mile yesterday, haha. So I got HALT spray, which shoots something nauseaous for 12 ft. Casey (?) also gave me the blog of some bikers that stopped on their way from San Francisco to- DETROIT! They were headed to do abandoned home renovations in Detroit. Their blog is- http://pedalaswegrow.blogspot.com/
and their mission statement: "We're heading to Detroit from SF in early June via bicycles to occupy abandoned buildings to help build a self-sustainable, environmentally sound, non-hierarchical, anarcho-communist community out of the ashes of post-apocalyptic Detroit" - haha, wow, post-apocalyptic detroit. man. Being from Detroit, that's a heavy one. I should give them a visit sometime and see if they made their anarcho-communist haven out of segregated post-apocalyptic/aka post-industrial detroit, and see whether they're having any success- what is their definition of "success" in these circumstances... I'll be honest, it sounds to me like San Fran yuppies moving into Detroit to live out some sort of esoteric idealism that won't do much to change what's actually going on in Detroit. But that's my opinion, and I hope I'm wrong. It's actually intersting, Detroit is attracting a lot of projects like that these days. I think if I remember right, it has the most urban gardens in the US. Detroit is a fascinating case study of post-industrial decay/renewal(?).

Anyways, thank you for your awesome help Casey and ___ (please email me/message the blog with your names!).

So, in good spirits, and excited to plow through Nebraska to Wyoming, I start my third week-

Miroslav


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Update: To make things even better, I just fixed my phone. Expect lots more photos!