When I was collecting my gear I noticed my bike computer was dead. Dead, dead, dead. Riding without a computer means you don't have a lot of really necessry data. Next turn is in 5km ... I don't know how far that is. Speed tells you if the wind is helping or hurting. For a ride like this it is critical to have the information it provides. I felt blind today.
It was raining ... not hard but enough to keep me soggy most of the day. It is a pain to pull out the phone in its plastic baggie so I took almost no pictures today.
I thought about taking a more main road detour because I'd heard that a section of the route might be closed because of flooding. Since it hadn't rained much in the night and it wasn't rain hard now I decided to risk it. The road was open and while there was water in the fields it was well off the road.
I was thinking about my lost friend. It was the Aquafina water bottle I had carried since the California-Nevada border ... I called him Water Bottle. Water Bottle was with me leaving Great Bend and I finished his contents off when I ate my patty melt but later that day I noticed him missing. I might have lost him on the sand road on one of the missed turns. I fear I may have accidently littered him. Together we crossed deserts, mountains and plains ... RIP (recycle in peace) old friend.
Roads today were mostly the smaller ones and traffic was pretty light. It would have been pleasant if I was so soggy. I stopped for breakfast in Girard which is laid out like the town in Back To The Future with the town hall in the middle of a block with shops all around. About half of the shops were still shops.
Later I met the lone west bound rider of the day. We did the usual exchange of info. He was a software developer and had done the post-pandemic quit.
Highlight of the day was leaving Kansas and entering Missouri. The roads got a little worse.
Since there were no motels on route that were not too close or too far, last night I booked one a little off the route. I am in Lamar, MO ... the birth place of the infamous war criminal Harry S. Truman.
I should have booked off route in the other direction because I have decided to leave the TransAmerican Route and jump down to the Route 66 Route. They run parallel to just past Springfield where they cross and Route 66 heads north to Chicago. Route 66 goes through Springfield and they have bike shops. One of which is holding their sole Wahoo computer for me. It will be a bit of an upgrade. Just now I was looking at my rear tire and it is pretty chewed up. The rubber is worn and the threads are showing. I will likely be getting a new tire too.
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