One of the toughest yet best days of the trip so far, both of of us fell off again, me loads of times, Geoff just the once, wet sand, wet sticky mud, plenty of swearing, miles of open prairie, real big blue skies with fluffy white clouds all day long... magic...
We left Alva this morning after a cold pizza & coffee breakfast & onto some very innocuous lanes, that lulled us into a false sense of security... then the storm that we missed last night came back to bite us in the guise of some very slippy wet sand. The tyres clogged up in it, the bikes were plastered but we scraped through, managing to make some distance even though we were only travelling at 15mph! Confidence grew as we hit some better surfaces & the speeds increased until we hit one section of the trail that had me over in 50 yards, then I fell at least 6 more times as my front tyre locked up with a mud & sand mix glueing up the front wheel totally, this meant I had to plow a track forward until I could get the bike onto some ground it would stand up in, then jump off & scrape all the mud from under the lower mudguard, pig of a job!!
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| Breakfast of Champions!! |
The longest 20 mins of the trip that bit of lane was, sweating, swearing, wobbling, picking the bike up in the heat, we were both so glad to get to the tarmac at the end!! Things cleared up for awhile after this & we wound our way up into some beautiful country, loads of horses & cattle grazing, rolling grasslands stretching so far into the distance, that really big blue sky lighting the whole place up, What a beautiful place to be!
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| Feck I'll be glad to get off this bit of trail!!! |
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| No straight lines out here!! |
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| After the splat! |
As the day wore on we had a few more soft wet sand moments to keep us on our toes, every time we relaxed another bit popped up to remind us that this was a day to pay attention to our trail.
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| BIG blue sky... |
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| Feck it's hot out there! |
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| The mud dried like concrete too, upset the wheels balance!! |
We rolled into Liberal in Kansas state around 5pm, so a long day rounded off by a great Chinese buffet dinner & a night in one of the nicer motels we've stayed in too...(The America Best Value Inn $70). Happy days...
The only downside to the day was the bolt that holds my GPS cradle on vibrated out & disappeared into the gravelly sand this afternoon, this was my main means of navigation, so a duct tape repair saw me back out front as it was my day to lead... no bolts to replace the lost one with so a cable tie solution has been rigged up for now & we'll see what we can find as we travel.
Great day, great scenery & great biking, what more could you ask for on a trip!!!
Hope everyone is good
Cheers for now...
