Jul/090
Day 31 – Bad day (35 miles)
Woke up and tried to get moving but there wasn’t much motivation because:
1) It was a short day;
2) The next day would be a rest day;
3) 10 pitchers of beer and a few splashes of whisky the night before.
Got moving eventually, but not before Callum and Dowds beat me to the continental breakfast and Cal managed to eat everything except for a couple of packets of butter.
We chose to take a more direct route into Hutchinson, because it was 6 miles off-route anyway. We’d asked some of the locals if they had any idea how suitable US-50 would be for cyclists; we got conflicting responses ranging from “it’s fine” to “you’ll die”, but they did all agree that it had decent-sized shoulders and Google street view looked OK.
It wasn’t too bad. Not the nicest of roads, but the traffic wasn’t particularly heavy and the shoulder was OK. Callum had snapped his chain the day before by managing to avoid oiling his chain for pretty much the entire trip. As a result Cal’s bike sounded like he was cycling over a chalkboard with wheels made of nails – not the best thing for a hangover, especially for Dowds who wasn’t using his MP3 player.We stopped at around the halfway point for food and couldn’t help but laugh at Dowds who didn’t look too healthy. None of us felt amazing and we just wanted to get to Hutchinson. This ended up taking a little while longer than expected as Blake got a puncture a few miles down the road. Sorted it out and headed to the bike shop in Hutchinson who hold the keys for a free hostel for bikers at a nearby church. We found the hostel (v. nice), ditched our stuff and dropped the bikes in for some essential maintenance. Callum bought a new chain, I got them to sort out my gears, Dowds didn’t need anything but left his bike in there anyway and Blake… is a bike shop’s dream. New chain, new tyre – both were fine but he is an American so he is indoctrinated with the idea of regular servicing and we couldn’t convince him otherwise. Crazy yank.
Ate some food at a big mexican buffet place and slept like babies with the knowledge that tomorrow we had to do 0 miles.