PowerCycle

04/25 Where to begin… the weather is a good place I suppose. It sure looked like it was going to be raining all day but not a drop. No sun today but I’ll take dry as a welcome substitute. The wind was a killer though. Right in my face all day and it wasn’t a warm, pleasant breeze either. I can hear the thunder now and it’s getting closer so it’ll be raining soon.

The biggest thing that happened was my first dog bite. Luckily it latched onto my pannier instead of my leg. It actually bit the small, waterproof bag that attaches to the rear of the left pannier and held on for a second. There’s no way a 50 lb dog is bringing down 320 lbs of me/bike/gear so it let go after being dragged for a couple feet. After pedaling away from it for 50 feet I stopped to check for damage and was glad it’s teeth didn’t go through (yay Ortlieb). The bag has all my tools in it so it wouldn’t have been the end of the world since I could just keep them in a baggie. It was one of those fast and quiet ones so I didn’t know it was after me until I heard it right behind me.

It happened on rural road (Hwy 7) about a mile and a half before the Doniphan County line. The owner of the dog saw it run out across the road after me and tried to yell at it to come back but he didn’t even bother to get up off his tractor to get his stupid dog back. Once his dog was back on his property and I was checking for damage at the side of the road you’d think he’d come over to see if I was OK right? Wrong. He drove his tractor over to a barn so I wouldn’t be able to see him. It might have been because I busted out my camera to record this historic event and he’s camera shy. He’s just luckily there was no damage and that I didn’t see a cop after that. I swore to myself that from now on if any dog runs at me its getting a dose of pepper spray.

Dog #2 ran at me less than a mile up the road and boy did it do a 180 when I blasted it with Halt!. This one ran at me before I could even get out my dog taser. The pepper spray is very accessible though. Kansas is shaping to be a worse dog state than Georgia.

There were no stores from the time I left and probably won’t be for another 11 miles tomorrow. Had enough to snack on and because I wasn’t sweating very much I had more than enough water for the 35 mile trip here.

My home for the night is the city park in White Cloud (pop. 239). It’s my first time staying in a city park and I like it. There’s an open shelter right next to me with picnic tables, a bathroom with running water and nice soft grass to sleep on. They even have wireless here (OK, one of the houses close by does). There’s also an electrical outlet I used to charge up the camera battery. There are no open stores in the town but I have lot’s of food. I kind of feel guilty staying here for free and not even being able to buy stuff from a store to support to town’s economy a bit.

The town is small but it has a couple interesting things in it. One is a memorial commemorating the piggy bank. According to the sign they created it to honor a 10 year old boy who saved up his money to help raise funds for a leper colony. The other thing here is a lookout that let’s you see 4 different states: Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. The problem with lookouts is that there are on top of hills so I’ll just settle for riding through them all.

I don’t want to jinx it but my foot is almost fully healed. No pain at all. So now everything from my waist down has been injured at some point. All I need now is a wrist/elbow/shoulder/neck problem.

GPX Track