June 1, 2024
Second Trip, Day 2 - Springbrook State Park to Perry (Iowa)
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You wouldn't know it from the beautifully sunlit morning, but apparently it rained last night. Heavily. I slept great, and I'm pretty sure I didn't move all night, or even twitch.
Carl? Not so great. In addition to the rain disrupting his sleep, at 3:00 he was awakened by car tires crunching on gravel as someone drove up to the restroom across from us. What made it particularly annoying was that he watched them drive back to their campsite, which was only about 50 yards away. At the time, it wasn't even raining.
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Immediately after we took that picture, there was a steep climb. RideWithGPS glitched, so I'm not sure how steep, but I'm guessing 8-10%. Because we hadn't done any warming up Carl's knee began hurting, and it didn't get any better the rest of the day.
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Once we arrived in Perry, our stop for the night, we pedaled around a bit in order to check out the town. At one point, we stopped at a small Mexican grocery store. Out of curiosity I wandered through the aisles to see what was available and found something quite interesting.
And quite illegal.
Some drugs in America are classified as "scheduled." That means their use and distribution are tightly controlled because of their potential for abuse or the potential risks if used, even appropriately. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw some tramadol, a Schedule IV class drug, sitting on the shelf available for purchase. There were also prescription antibiotics (unscheduled, but you need a prescription to get them) and other interesting potential purchases. Even Vermox, in case I get pinworms from eating their food.
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We decided to eat at the Hotel Patee for dinner, and asked the woman at the front desk where we could park our bikes. She directed us to a hallway in the back of the building which was very trafficked, but still felt secure. The Hotel Patee doesn't sell pâté, but did sell us a decent dinner.
There wasn't a wine list so we asked the waitress if they had any. The answer, after qualifying that she was substituting for the regular waitress, was "Yes." When we asked for more specifics ("What kind?"), the answer was, "Oh, red and white." Given the multitude of choices I had to think about it a while, but eventually settled on "red."
A day of bike touring isn't complete without ice cream so we rode to Frio and bought a couple of scoops before heading over to the police station.
Inside the building you can only get as far as the reception area, although "reception area" might not be the best description since there was no one there recepting us. Carl pressed the intercom button and said we just wanted to pay for a campsite over at the City Park. We heard the detached voice of a dispatcher let us know that the officer on duty was "out on a call," but would be back shortly.
Thirty minutes later, we were wondering exactly how rampant crime in Perry must.... an emergency call for a chipped tooth after a person bit into a loaf of El Rey bread and found metal, or an attempted overdose of a deworming medication.
We eventually paid our $10.00 and pedaled over to the City Park. The campsite was a strip of grass between a parking lot and a fenced baseball field, but it suited our purposes.... all we needed was a restroom and a place to put up a couple of tents. A shower would've been nice, but for $10.oo we were out of luck.
There were three RVs in the parking lot, one of which had a guy sitting in a chair which was positioned so that he could see outside. Other than us, there wasn't that much to see, and we really weren't that interesting.
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