Today dawned with rain and storms still moving through the Omaha area, so I had to wait until almost 9am to leave.

The first thing I noticed was the humidity – with all the rain overnight it was off the charts. The forecast was upper 80s so it was promising to be a muggy day.

I wound my way out of Council Bluffs and immediately ran into a steep climb – with grades up to 10%. The hills would turn out to be an all-day challenge. The rollers I remember from the midwest are more gradual, but these were short and steep.

Then I somehow got off-course. My GPS has turn-by-turn directions, but I went through a couple of roundabouts and where my GPS said left, left wasn’t that clear on a 3-way. I think the GPS rerouted quickly and then gave me further turns, so I thought I was still on course. Once I realized I wasn’t, it was a few miles and a few more hills to get back on track.

The first several miles of Iowa heading away from the Missouri River are like a series of ridges (or ripples) so I hope the center of Iowa is a bit less hilly once I get there.

Some of the farmfields were even sort of terraced (not like Italy where very steep hills are farmed with dozens of narrow terraces) but these fields definitely had different levels:

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I reached Atlantic, IA a bit after 2pm. My quads hurt from over 3000 feet of climbing, and I had consumed over a gallon of liquids as the humidity and climbing had me sweating profusely all day.

This picture is a microcosm of my day:

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Atlantic’s main street (being Hwy 6) was fairly industrial, but I found a cute downtown area with a nice one-block park or town square, and 3 blocks of old brick storefronts. Unlike some of the towns I’ve passed through, these seemed to have a decent level of activity and there weren’t many vacant storefronts.

In the town square, there was a farmers market and I got dinner from a local bbq food truck – very good!

I took pictures of downtown and the farmers market, but for some reason, these weren’t on my phone when I got back to my motel. I rebooted my phone and hope that doesn’t happen again.

Overall, this was a challenging day with more climbing than I had anticipated. Tomorrow looks a bit flatter as I head to Van Meter.

The most relevant track today was “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. My sweat wasn’t cold, but had me soaking wet all day, so I think it counts. Also it’s a nice long track that I got lost in for a few minutes.