PowerCycle

05/02 More of the same as far as the wind goes. Still managed to sneak in almost 53 miles. It seems like such as shame having nice flat roads, a clear sky and only being able to max out at 10 mph. I can’t be doing that many miles just yet though because my Achilles tendon feels like it did right after I had to take those 4 days off to recover from it. Too much pressure I guess from having to push into the wind and up a few decent-sized hills.

Was riding most of the day out in the middle of nowhere. In Sioux City I was supposed to ride along a bicycle trail for a bit but I couldn’t find where to join up with it. I thought it would be right after I had to use some creative ingenuity to get past a section of the road that was closed but no such luck. Didn’t matter that much because I was on the roads before rush hour and toward the edge of the city so traffic wasn’t an issue.

Staying in Stone State Park tonight ($11). Like a dummy I thought I had to go the park office to register for a campsite so I pedaled to the other side of the park to get to it only to find out they have a self-reservation booth at the campsite (which I passed on the way in). At least I was able to cruise down the huge hills that I had to climb up to get to the park office.

While I was enjoying a nice DQ Snickers Blizzard in town a guy in a truck pulled up and started asking about my trip. He’s a fellow touring cyclist and host on warmshowers.org which is a lot like couchsurfing.com. He asked if he could stop by later with one of his friends so I said sure. It would be nice to have someone to talk who enjoys touring as much as I do. There were a lot of cyclists in town but I think they were just out for shorter rides.

I’ll be in South Dakota tomorrow which is a huge milestone for me. It’s officially the start of my Western trek to Yellowstone and then up through the Rocky Mountains into Canada.

GPX Track

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Leg 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.