Jul/093
Day 30 – Silly day (73 miles)
Callum wasn’t too happy towards the end of last night when we told him that the actual mileage for today would be around 75 – not the 60 that Dowds’ had roughly worked out before the extended ride to Eureka. Like a true Lad on Tour, he manned up and accepted it.
At some point we’ll stick up a post explaining just who or what ‘Blake’ is but for now let’s just call him our American pet – he follows along whenever he manages not to fall off his bike, makes lots of noise and barks outside the door at 4am when he’s scared of the coyotes outside.
On our Walmart walkie-talkies we’d been picking up interference from a fast food place or somewhere like that from around 6pm onwards. At the time we were looking for a restaurant so Callum asked the mystery people on the radio and they shut up after that. We left the radio on and at around 4am we got some really weird voice coming in over the radio. None of us were really sure if we were still dreaming – it was freaky – but eventually I woke up a bit and realised it sounded a lot like Blake. It turns out he’d made the 20 mile ride into town after seeing coyotes sniffing around his panniers. He couldn’t get back to sleep and decided to ride in the pitch black of night to our motel where we’d told him there was a bed waiting if he continued on to Eureka. My comment (over the radio): “Are you f**king insane???”. Blake got a few hours kip but not before having to wake up Reidy who was (understandably) absolutely petrified and woke up staring at him with his fist cocked ready to smack him one.
Set off for Newton around 9pm since Dowds had to wait around for the post office to open. He lost his camera charger before the holiday, tried to get one via express delivery just before we left but ended up having to get his mum to send it to a post office in the middle of the USA. After all that hassle, his camera didn’t work because he had accidentally filled it with rainwater a few weeks back.
We had a pretty normal ride, with one 38 mile stretch at the end with absolutely no services… which was nice. Just to prove that you will find Yorkshiremen bloody everywhere we met an Eastbound older chap called Paul Davenport who had cycled pretty much all over the world (including Africa, South America and the Andes in winter) and had just gotten around to doing the USA. Dad and Uncle Rick: sorry, forgot to ask if he was a Wednesday or United fan, but he did like Henderson’s.
Paul Davenport – “World touring cyclist and gentleman of leisure”
We met a cool American couple just down the road and did the standard exchange of info on what’s ahead etc.
We made pretty good time into Newton, with a short sprint towards the end just for fun. As usual the first thing we did was find food, and afterwards we went back to a bar we’d seen on Main Street.
After…a few…I snapped this photo which probably says it best:
Oh Dowds…
You can’t get the real American experience until you’ve gotten intoxicated with the locals in an ill-lit bar in Kansas… right? That’s our justification anyway.
We had planned to camp that night, but managed to find out which motel Blake had gone to and, in a reverse of last night, knocked on his door around 2am asking for a place to stay.
Lads on tour…occasionally on bikes.