TransAm Day #25 Cassoday, KS - Nickerson, KS
TransAm Day #25
June 19, 2018
Cassoday, KS - Nickerson, KS
91 Miles
Ride Time 6:55 Hours
Tour Total Miles 1868
I slept in my hammock stretched out in the Cassoday park gazebo last night as freight trains blared through town every twenty minutes. It wasn’t the most restful night’s sleep. I got cold in the middle of the night and had to pull out my sleeping bag. My alarm chimed at 3:30am, but it took me an hour before I was ready to ride. There was an issue in the outhouse trying to squeeze out what felt like a brick.
My map warned me that there were no services for the first forty miles. The ride was a perfectly straight line on a small county road. It was a smart idea to ride this in the early morning, and not under the blazing afternoon sun. The flatness, emptiness, and light spill from far away towns in the distance reminded me of my Sahara desert crossing in 1993. I’ve definitely got a thing for crossings. Libby helped me pinpoint it linked to thresholds- getting from one place to another.
Charlotte observed last night that I’m living outside all the time, which I’m not normally used to doing in the city. My skin is deeply tanned, and I’ve got bug bite sores. I’m acutely in tune with the weather and how to work with it. I told Charlotte that this was a trip that I had to do. There was no choice. It was my destiny. I am beaming and I feel completely in sync with myself and the universe. I was meant to do this adventure, and I am fortunate that I was able to recognize this need and act on it.
Yesterday while Steve was repairing his spoke, I fixed my American flag which had been coming loose from its staff. It’s once again properly displayed on the back of my bike. My rubber lizard is doing fine on my front left brake cable. I’ve decided to name him Wilson.
I saw many more pump jacks and oil tanks alongside the road today. It seems that every ranch has some sort of entrance gate. I’ve seen creatively built entrances with old steel wagon wheels arranged to make patterns, rebar lettering, geometric wooden post arrangements, steel tubing, and then really lame gates with just two wooden poles and a piece of barbwire over the top.
I pulled into Newton at 8am, and asked a man at a gas station where I could get some breakfast. He recommended the Bread Basket, which featured a buffet. It was mediocre fare, and I had to endure overhearing a conversation between the mayor of Newton and some other bureaucrat. I hate politicians.
I checked in at the #rustycrank blog and noticed that yesterday’s post was all screwed up. So I corrected it. I spend about 90 minutes every day writing and editing these posts. I first upload them to a touring site called ‘Crazy Guy on a Bike’ which is a fantastic resource for cyclists and it’s an easy to use platform. Then I go to Google Blogger and the frustration begins. There used to be a great Blogger app for iPhones but it’s been discontinued. So I have to use a browser (Google Chrome to keep it native) through the Blogger website, which absolutely sucks on an iPhone. Google- you should be ashamed of yourself. You’re collecting information from all my readers. You’re probably pitching them advertisements. No doubt you probably own and have all the rights to my content and photos. And to boot, I have to jump though a million ridiculous hoops to format and upload everything. Make the damn platform easier to use. You really suck Google.
I learned from Mike Riscica’s blog and was reminded from a card at the church in Sebree that there was a really good bike shop in Newton. I’ve put a lot of stress on my bike and I’ll soon be in the Rockies. I called them yesterday but they told me they were extremely busy due to the races and high touring season. The earliest reservation I could get today was for 3pm, which didn’t work with my schedule. After breakfast, I decided to just pedal by and check it out- even though they wouldn't be open for another hour. Out front I met the owner James, who asked me about my trip. He quickly ran inside and grabbed a chain measuring tool. My chain had stretched 50-75% from my ninety pounds of gear being lugged over the Appalachian mountains by my monster unicyclist thighs. Boom!💥 My bike was quickly stripped of its panniers and up on a rack for a new chain. Thank you Carl! Heather, it was awesome to meet you! The big race was up on the screen. A large touring group had just spent the night here on the floor. A Polish racer rode in while I was there. A sign on the wall called it an ‘Oasis in the grassy desert’. Before I left, I met a fellow cyclist from Williamsburg Brooklyn. She was traveling westbound, but taking the day off in Newton. What a great place!
The plains of Kansas are wild. There’s a lot of one point perspective. The electrical power lines trail off forever into the horizon. Judging distances is deceptive. You can see the town water towers from six miles out, but it seems like only one or two miles.
It was another hot day with fierce twenty eight mile and hour cross winds. I rode into Buhler to get a cold beverage. There I met Jim MacGyver, who asked if he could sit down and talk with me. Jim was born and raised in the south west dustbowl corner of Kansas. He served in the Korean War as a flight engineer, and had flown in and out of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. He’s lived in this area for a long time and spent many years cycling all over North America. He’s ridden all over Kansas, and was able to answer a lot of my questions. He told me, for example, that the giant irrigation spokes that are prevalent here in Kansas move by themselves. He told me that corn could only be grown where there was irrigation and that many of the aquifers had been pumped dry. In eastern Kansas there is little water now, so they can only grow wheat, beans, sorghum, and cotton. Jim said that they’ve been pumping oil here since the depression but that current prices were so low that many of the wells have been turned off. All the distribution piping was underground. He said that Kansas has suffered earthquakes like Oklahoma, to the south, because of these oil wells and fracking. Jim explained that many of the large grain elevators in the big towns were no longer being used because the operators charge too much money for storage. Farmers now had their own metal silos. He said that the current price of wheat was five dollars a bushel which is a really good price, and that farmers were selling and not storing. He said that combines were now fifty feet wide and cost half a million dollars. Many farmers now prefers to lease equipment instead of buy. It sounds like a lot of large players have gobbled up smaller farms. He mentioned these 5500 hectare outfits (that’s about ten square miles). Jim mentioned that there had been a storm last night in nearby Hutchinson and that the power was cut off. I was totally unaffected last night in Cassoday. It looked though, like clouds were forming and rolling in today. Jim said that he preferred to cycle by himself. He liked not knowing where he would be spending the night.
Although Kansas seems flat my total ascent today has been about 900 feet. I’m now at about 1700 feet above sea level, which will continue to rise as I near Colorado. I’ve been somewhat following the little Arkansas River today. This is Mennonite country. I heard that they all came over from the Ukraine in the late nineteenth century.
I finally made it to Nickerson. I'm staying at the Hendrick Exotic Animal Farm, which boasts giraffes, zebras, camels, llamas, ostriches, and all sorts of cool stuff. It's run by a third generation rodeo clown. Thunderstorms are in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow.
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