Day 44: Cedar River to Clinton

Posted by: Arin

I knew we weren't in for good things as soon as we got up to the bridge we were sleeping near. It had no shoulder and not a very tall wall. We even had to wait a bit just to have enough room in the traffic to get over it. Once we got over the bridge it wasn't any better. There was literally no shoulder so we were forced to ride in the loose gravel on the side of the road. Any cyclist who has ridden on gravel will agree that it uses much more energy to go the same speed you would on the road. Our first 20 miles of the day were spent mostly off the side of the road, toiling.

We made it to a town and I was not feeling so great about riding. We pulled down a side road to the city park to take a break and eat. While we were there, we had a couple good interactions with people on bikes. One was a lady who had a big dog carrier with a seatbelt on the back of her bike for carrying around a little dog. She was riding to her job but stopped to chat for a while. The other person was an old man. He stopped at the park to drink water out of the spigot, and stuck around to talk with us a while. He actually talked our ears off. It was his 88th birthday, and he was just out riding his bike like he always does. A very funny old man, he had crazy energy and was convinced the only way he's ever going to get enough money from the government for Medicare is by robbing a bank and going to jail. That way he can have free housing, free food, and free clothing. He was also a World War II veteran. I was happy to have talked to him.

The first lady we talked to told us about an ice cream parlor in town so we had to go. We got there and it looked closed, but some drunk people from the bar next door told us that it's connected to the bar. One guy even bought our ice cream! We stood around for a while talking to old drunk people about what we were doing for a while. They were in disbelief. We told them we were going to try to make it to the Mississippi by the end of the day and they said we wouldn't make it. It was already 4pm and we had 50 more miles and bellies full of ice cream.

We made it there by 7. We were hauling ass on those touring bikes and the shoulder got huge. Our first order of business was to get supplies for dinner and fill our water. The second was to get to the Mississippi River bank. We got to a picnic table and cooked dinner on the side of the river before riding to a spot we deemed safe enough and setting up camp for the night.