July 7, 2016 to July 8, 2020
“If you see a bicycle on THIS road, you just have to stop”
Days Thirty-Seven and Thirty-Eight: Chugwater, Wyoming to Gering, Nebraska
We hadn’t put the tent fly on last night, and without its shade, I woke up as soon as the sun appeared, around 5:00. I estimate that I got maybe four hours of sleep. At most. Since there was no bathroom in the park where we camped, I rode the half mile to the interstate rest area to go the bathroom, while Joy started packing things up.
Neither the bar-and-grill nor the soda fountain in Chugwater was open this early, so we had breakfast at a picnic table in the park — oatmeal for me, a Snickers bar for Joy — and then Joy rode out of town while I visited the rest area one more time, then followed her on the quiet paved road several minutes later.
We had a tailwind, and even though the first part of the ride was a long, steady climb, it took me quite a while to catch up with Joy, who was riding much faster than usual. Maybe I should have had a Snickers bar for breakfast.
The morning ride was one of the best of the entire trip. This was one of the emptiest, smoothest paved roads I’ve ever biked on.
After a long descent, and several easy, flat miles, the road ended, and we turned onto US-85 for a while. It was busy, but had a wide shoulder, so it was alright. We got to Hawk Springs (pop. 45) around 10:30, pulled into a restaurant which we were pleased to find actually did exist, and were the first lunch customers of the day. The owner of the restaurant was a friendly guy, who provided some rare helpful advice about road conditions, in this case the dirt and gravel roads we planned to take into Nebraska this afternoon.
We left Hawk Springs on a straight-as-a-ruler Wyoming gravel county road. By now it was hot, and there was zero shade. There were only a couple of houses alongside the road, and from the yard of one of them a dog came out and chased us for a long time. “When was the last time that dog saw a cyclist?” Joy wondered. I bet it had never seen one in its life, because we were in an unpopulated area far, far from any recognized cycling route.
After a while, many grasshoppers appeared on the road. “I’m calling this the Plague of Locusts Road” said my wife, who detests grasshoppers. When I asked why she hated them, she muttered something about their “sticky legs” and shuddered, which led to me making an unfortunate “joke” about what would happen if a sticky-legged grasshopper became attached to her sunblock-slathered face. I won’t make jokes about that kind of stuff anymore, I guess.
We entered Nebraska without getting a state sign, or even detectable change in the quality of gravel, which was a bit of a letdown. Around that time we saw the first cornfield of this trip, which did feel like a milestone.
Soon after that, a farmer in a pickup truck stopped to ask if we were lost, and then talked to us for a while. “If you see a bicycle on THIS road, you just have to stop”, he said.
We continued on as it got hotter, and there continued to be very little shade. A lady (and her three dogs) in a pickup truck pulled over to ask if we were lost, and if we needed anything. As I found when I rode across the state in 2013, people in Nebraska are nice.
The grasshoppers made a reappearance for a few miles, and this time I was grossed out by them. “Ugh, look, they are copulating on the road”, I said. “That’s not so bad, I saw some eating each other earlier”, Joy replied. We have decided that we both really hate grasshoppers now.
I started getting tired, and possibly dehydrated, and I actually briefly forgot how to get back on my bike after I stopped to rest for a minute; For some reason I found it difficult to swing my leg over the now-heavily-loaded rear rack. Fortunately I got that worked out relatively quickly, and we were able to continue.
We passed near a beautiful area called the Wildcat Hills, which looked very un-Nebraska-like, and then reached Gering (population 8,500) to find that a large, multi-day festival called Oregon Trail Days was beginning (“The longest, continuing running celebration in Nebraska!”). We got the last motel room in town, and as we were walking our bikes down the hallway to our room, a man called out “So, you made it!” In an amazing coincidence, it was John Baker, the man on the recumbent we’d briefly met the other day as we left Laramie. He’s an artist, and was in town to show his work at the art show during Oregon Trail Days.
Later we walked downtown to check out the festival, and listened to a local band playing in the street. Joy was craving vegetables, so she had dinner at the Chinese restaurant, and I went to Subway and ordered the exact same meat-and-cheese sandwich I always get there, because I wasn’t craving vegetables, and in fact cannot remember when I have ever “craved” vegetables.
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Today's ride: 72 miles (116 km)
Total: 1,389 miles (2,235 km)
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