Friday 6/5/05

A seriously windy day today. Winds blowing at 25-30 miles an hour all day, it had to be the hardest 50 miles ever. Actually I tell a lie it was 35 miles of serious cross winds bad enough to blow you clear off the road, especially when a cattle truck comes by ( they are the worst because they are well ventilated so their wind resistance is high and they travel with a wall of wind) but we had 20 miles with the wind behind us which we did in under 50 minutes which was quite something. Mark because his panniers are high and act like a sail was blown 5-10 yards off the road 5 times.
I (Alex) managed to wind up a republican for the first time at lunch, which wasn't as major a coup as I hoped, in fact I felt a smidgin bad about it because the guy was over 80, had a hernia the size of a football and and inoperable anuyrism which could explode at any time, but once he dragged me into it it got quite heated. His major grudge against the democratic party was its 'liberal' policies were trying to have gun control and pumping tax money into social services (which are clearly inadequate over here). Oh well. Any way he was pretty friendly otherwise and we left on good terms after he told us about the cyclist in eastern colorado he pick up in a sand storm. Apparently the guy was riding through 60 mile an hour winds at over 100 degrees farenheight, he was red raw. His words when this guy stopped were 'get me the hell out of this god forsaken country!!'. Theres a good chance we've got this to come, oh no!
Anyway we rode to a little place called Bazine where we found Elaine's Bicycle Oasis. A very nice lady who let us camp on her lawn for a fee and then cooked us up a humungous breakfast of pancakes, fruit, sausages and coffee before sending us on our way.