Day 32
The shortest distance between two points is under construction

DAILY REPORT: Boy, am I a tired puppy today...it's been one zoom to take care of a problem to another all day.  It started first thing before Barb and i even got out of the room this morning.  I was in the bathroom and Barb knocked on the door and said, "I can't get out of the room."  "What do you mean, you can't get out of the room?" I asked.  "The door won't open," She said.  She was right...the safety locks in the latch wouldn't clear so the door was jammed.  I didn't think of how dangerous that would have been if we'd had an emergency, but undaunted, we opened the window (luckily, we were on the first floor), took out the screen, and threw our stuff out the window just as the manager was approaching the building checking in for work.  He must have thought we were stealing stuff out of someone's room, but we assured him the stuff was ours.

After that little incident the rest of the morning seemed innocently enough as the white van and I in the silver van got our chuckles when we caught about 30 riders who had missed the second turn.  I was approaching that turn when I saw a peloton of riders coming back from the other direction...whoa folks...now we were on track.

All back to normal, I worked my way to the front to get some photos of the beautiful countryside as the riders rode by and was starting to relax into the routine when I got a frantic call from Barb that a bridge was out and she needed help to navigate around it.  She set up an impromptu SAG as I zoomed to the front to investigate the possibilities as DOT had added about 8 miles to our route with a paved detour.  I checked out a couple gravel road options but they were too sketchy with steep, curvy downhills with gravel all over.  I called back to the SAG and advised everyone to take the DOT detour.  It seems like every year around here we run into construction which makes the day exciting. 

The detour added about 8 miles to our day, but the scenery was absolutely beautiful.  Our terrain today was a bit more rolling than we've had in the past few days and we had 1 real good climb at the 65 mile point...I'm in trouble again as I told everyone that it was probably about a 7% grade for a mile, but it was more like 9% or 10% in places...but it WAS only a mile.  If you like corn and soybeans, you'd love our ride today.  Everywhere we would look we'd see rotation planting and rolling hills dotted with barns and silos behind every farm house.  It's much different here than where I grew up on a farm.  Here the fields are much bigger and they seem to be able to plant corn or beans on just about any slope that a tractor can negotiate.  The slopes are so steep that they have to plant in strips with areas between left to grass.  I imagine it helps with erosion...if they'd till all the slope, it would wash away with the first rain I figure.

We're also starting to see more and more small towns along our route.  After Wyoming and South Dakota, anything would seem like over population, but it's nice to see civilization more often.  It takes a little stress off the SAG vehicles when the riders can stop ever so often and buy a fat pill or two.  Today's favorite stop was in Rushford where after gorging themselves with cream filled pastries, the riders elected to ride the bike trail to Houston...the next town 11 miles away. The riders said it was a home run and it was a great route to the second SAG that kept them off the highway for 11 miles.

After things had settled down after the construction detours, I settled back in the normal routine until I got another call from Barb about more construction just before going across the river.  When I got to that location, I found the entire road gone and traffic altered to a short section of narrow passage.  I zoomed around again and put down directional arrows to get them around the mess...another potential problem fixed...whew,  I was pretty well cooked by this part of the day.

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