6/23/29

Today, being Sunday morning, our breakfast selections were few and far between so we went to Casey’s Convenient store.  I picked up two breakfast sandwiches.  Nothing to write home about.  What a way to start 94 mile ride.

At the start of the day the weather was perfect.  Cool, no rain and a tail wind.  Shame it didn’t last.  Most of the day we had a fairly hard side wind.  When you know you have a long ride wind plays hard on your mind.  Maybe it was just in our mind.  When I looked at the print out of our ride I was surprised how little we rode west, most of the day was riding north.

Today was another milestone day.  We crossed into Iowa.

The route today was interesting.  Close to the end of the day we came to a corner and we were forced to turn right.  My mind told me we should turn left and when I got the print out  my mind was actually correct.  For a direct route we should have turn left but due to the way the round was designed we had to turn right.

On the route we had to go down a long slope.  During this down hill my chain came off,  I tried everything to get it back on without stopping.  The place I had to stop was at a farm house that had two barking dogs.  They made a lot of noise and the farmer came out of his barn and said they wouldn’t hurt me, they just like to make noise, so I put my chain on and continued down the hill into Lowden.

Once we made it to Oxford Junction we put our bike in the Senior Center.  Then we ate dinner that was supplied by an alumni from another ride.  He went out of his way to serve us.

We also took showers in the volunteer fire station.  They made a make shift area for the shower which worked well. It was warm and clean.

The operator of the Senior Center gave us a history lesson of the town, the area, and the senior center.

None of us had phone service and the only way we could communicate was sit outside the library and connect to their internet.  The connection was not very good and the bugs drove you back inside the Senior Center.

They did have a nice little tourist area called the City Hall.