Day 55 - Oakley to Oberlin - Two Far 2021 - Sooo... Far

June 2, 2021

Day 55 - Oakley to Oberlin

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We had a long ride today - 63 miles, but it wasn't too hard. We were very tired by the end of the day, though.

Downtown Oakley - busy on Wednesday morning.

We began the day by visiting the Fick Fossil and History Museum. The museum shares a building with the town library.

I just love this sign in the shared lobby.

The museum contained fossils from Kansas' underwater history and artifacts from local history. The fossil displays didn't lend themselves to good photographs. Here are some interesting things from the historical exhibits. I focused on things we've never seen before.

A style of US mailbox we haven't seen before

A railroad maintenance car. The handles (sticking out in the rear) would slide fore and aft so the crew could lift the car on and off the tracks.

We still had over 60 miles to ride after we left the museum. We stayed on US 83 all day again. However, just a few miles north of Oberlin, we lost the nice wide shoulder, which we had grown accutomed to for the last few days, to this...

The shoulder was narrow, but the traffic was all courteous.

Call us spoiled, but we really prefer shoulders like this.

We saw the same things we've been seeing in rural Kansas. Most of the land is corn or wheat fields. Kerry read that over 90% of the land in Kansas is agricultural.

At one of our roadside stops, Kerry got another grain sample for a close up view.

Kerry here... We're in Kansas, so we think this is wheat.

But back on Day 34 in Mexia, TX, we were told that this was barley. It all looks the same to me!

We took a ride through the town of Rexford, which Google told us had a cafe and a convenience store. Sadly, both were out of business. We did get a picture of the town mural.

The only other town on our route was ten miles north. Seldon had one market and one restaurant. The folks at the market told us the cafe served lunch until 2:30. We arrived at the Midway Cafe at 2:00 to find that they had finished serving lunch and would not reopen until 5:00. Seeing our dismay, Gloria, the owner, very kindly invited us in and said she would fix us lunch.

Kerry in the Midway Cafe looking at the staff lunch. Gloria said it was the "dried out" remains of today's taco special and that she would fix us something better.

Gloria and her helper, Tammy, fixed us burgers and fries and the four of us enjoyed visiting over lunch. We really appreciated their feeding hungry cyclists.

We didn't get to Oberlin until after 5:00 PM. It was one of our longer days, but it was fun. We were happy to have a nice, new Cobblestone Inn in which to recover.

Nebraska tomorrow!

Today's ride: 63 miles (101 km)
Total: 2,231 miles (3,590 km)

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