Monday's ride

Well all in all it a long day. But we all made it.

A note before I go on about these damned typos. I've got the iPhone's
light down low to conserve battery power. The phone also attempts to
spell the word I'm typing and I don't always catch that. For
example the o and I are right next to each other. On a 1.5 inch
keyboard that's not a lot of space to make a mistake especially since
in and on are both valid words. I'll fix the typos of I ever get in
front of a real keyboard again.

Oh yeah. I can barely see what I'm typing.

I'm not being very verbose because I'm typing with 1 finger. Y'all may
actually appreciate that.

Finally AT&T has no signal in the whole damned state obviously. Thanks
to everyone who's called and im'd me but I can't call or IM you back.
I'm writing this at 10 pm but I have no signal at all so I don't know
when I can send it.

All right. As I said earlier the hills were every hit as bad as
everyone said they'd be. There's nothing like them in Ohio so I
couldn't have trained on them if I'd wanted to. Every time I thought
the next hill couldn't be worse by god it was.

I took my sweet time about riding today. Left at 615 am and got to
camp at 345 pm. The funnest town of them all was Coon Rapids. They
really appreciated us being there. I'll post more pix when I can.

I was on the seat for a little over 6.5 hours today. My feet had
gotten pretty sore, my butt was feeling no love, and I missed putting
sun tan lotion on my shoulder this morning. Had to find some aloe vera
lotion to ease the fire.

We're in Jefferson tonight. Went to a bar with a few new friends. Met
a 55 year old farmer dude who could have easily passed for 35. He was
saying the whole county only has 15000 people so this is a huge deal
for them. That seems to be true for any little town we're in. We're
in Ames tomorrow and that might be the biggest - by far - town on the
way. I think Jefferson has less than 6000 people

We really thought it was gonna be more thunderstorms tonight but the
front went on by. It was pretty bad looking.

Several places along the way had got clobbered by high winds last
night. Trees were broke in half, corn stalks had been badly destroyed.
One guy with us tonight was a farmer himself and estimated this one
farm's damage at over a million. For one storm.

There was a huge metal silo that got knocked down. It actually got
blown down and the wreckage got tossed 200 yards or more. Wasn't a
pretty site.

Ok I am beat. It's taken almost 40 minutes to peck out this letter.
I'm going to sleep. More posts as I can get the time and signal.