Road Trip! (USA Day 52)

Before anything else, I’ve put up a new vlog on my YouTube channel which I’d love you to check out. It covers the first week of our tour, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and it’s taken a while to get ready. The link should open in a new window so click it now and watch it after the blog. Enjoy!

No photos today, so here’s an awesome panorama from Kansas.

So aside from editing the video, the main activity today was a little excursion, thanks to grandpa Calvin, who offered to drive me to Garden City for a few bike bits and a replacement phone battery, after mine puffed up inside the case like a popcorn packet. Odd that on a rest day I travelled twice the distance of a normal riding day, except by truck, obviously, so it burnt fewer calories. On the journey, Calvin and I chatted trucks and bowling. Man stuff.

I found the trucking chat so genuinely interesting that on the way back home, we took a detour to Calvin’s house for a tour of his personal truck. It’s actually really cute. Tucked behind the driver’s seat is a whole tiny flat complete with telly, fridge, bunk beds and hot tub. One of those was a lie. I won’t go as far as saying I’d like to be a trucker when I grow up, but only because I never want to grow up.

Clearly, Amy wasn’t welcome on this testruckterone trip, but she’s been busy editing and organising the fabulous library of pictures that’s slowly building. You’ve seen some of them, but we’ll have to find a nice way of displaying the rest at some point.

The remainder of the day we spent in the cool basement of our hosts’ house, carefully watching the wind as it picked up…from the west. Stop that. We munched down some chicken quesadillas with the boys, the discussion focussing mainly on the diet of the racing turtles. (Yes, they eat frogs, but have you tried feeding them anything else? No, they won’t eat cheese balls.) After that we packed up our bikes to avoid blundering around too much in the dark of a 4am start to avoid the heat, and stood in the yard with the calves, all of us watching the thunderstorms roll north, each squall silhouetted by its sunset backdrop. The darker the sky, the more visible the skirmishes of lightning that flickered tirelessly. Eventually the rain rolled too close and we ran indoors to hide/sleep.

Have some sky. And a weirdly-distorted truck.

We have two nights left in Kansas before we hit Colorado. I can’t wait to see those hills, and that’s a phrase I’ll probably regret.

Don’t forget: new cycling vlog, get it while it’s fresh!