Day 29: North Platte to Lexington

Posted by: Arin

Tuesday night finds us camped out on the outskirts of a cemetery, but a lot of things happened for us to be here. 

The day started off pretty normally, packing up camp and getting on the road. We rode maybe 22 miles before getting to Gothenburg, a little town. There we decided that we haven't been drinking enough on this trip (we've had a couple beers a couple times), so we stopped into a liquor store to grab a couple 200ml whiskey bottles. From there, we went to the gas station to get some soda and headed to the park. 

It felt good to sit in the shade for a few hours during the middle of the day. The atmosphere of the park was nice, with cool old brick houses around and lots of trees. The one downer was that we were there at the same time as the lawn mower, so he was rolling around kicking up dust and making a lot of noise. While we were sitting there, a man approached us to give us some coffee samples. Apparently he's a minister but he sells coffee on the side, I'm not really sure though. He was standing closer to Brad and the lawn mower was pretty loud. Anyways, around 4 we had a nice buzz going and decided to hit the road, but on our way out we were stopped by a man and his grandkids. They wanted to talk to us about what we're doing. We talked for a while about riding and Nebraska. They were stoked on us, which is always awesome.

We finally got going... for a couple blocks. My rear tire went flat so we pulled over. I fixed it, added a tuffet strip, put the wheel back on, rode for 10 feet, and it went flat again! There was a new hole about two inches from the first one. I fixed that one and the same thing happened! Another hole two inches from the last one. This was getting pretty frustrating. I took the tire completely off, fully cleaned its inside and outside, cleaned the rim bed, and put the patched tube in. By this time, our buzz was wearing off but Brad went and got another 200ml to keep us going. The tire was finally holding air! 

We got back on the road only to find out it was closed all the way to Lexington, another 25 miles away. We didn't want to ride on the interstate, so we decided to risk it and ride on the closed highway. Luckily the road was still open to local traffic so we had a smooth lane to ride on. We got to Lexington around 8 and I found out my tire had a slow leak. I pumped it back up and we continued on, trying to find a place to sleep.

That's how we ended up at the cemetery. There was nothing else around, it was getting dark, and there was a corner that we could hide in. It was also called Evergreen, the same name as the cemetery by our houses in Riverside. We got to the corner and there weren't even any graves there, another bonus. After making a delicious dinner (pasta and spinach) we slipped into our sleeping bags and off into dreamland.