Day 26 -- Great Bend, KS to McPherson, KS

Miles: 64.19

Total Miles: 1896.15

Time: 3:52

Average Speed: 16.6 mph

Max Speed: 24.5 mph

Flats Today: 0

Total Flats: 11

Elevation Gain: 816 ft

Weather: 15 mph head and side winds around 90 degrees
Today was just another day of "middle of nowhere" scenery. At route rap last night, which is when they go over the route for the next day, it went a little like this: "Go right out of the hotel, ride 64 miles straight on route 56, then go left into the hotel." There wasn't even anything interesting for them to say that we might want to take a picture by. We knew we weren't going to have many pictures, so we decided to show you a little of what daily loading and sag stops were like. Anyway, we woke up at 5:55, ate breakfast at 6:30, loaded at 7:15, then left the hotel. We hustled out of the hotel since we were about last yesterday. We got out of the parking lot with Phil, who's the fastest rider on the trip, and we were only about 5 people out of first place... it was a much better start then the day before. We rode at about 19 mph with Phil, passed all of the people in front of us, and kept up our high speed all the way to the sag stop... 19 mph is really fast for us when we're riding into a 15 mph head wind. So, we rode into the sag stop very tired, but extremely excited because we were first. We hurried up to the sign in sheet so that we could beat Phil and be the first one's to sign in. Wade beat me to it, but he signed us both in, then we took a picture to prove we were first... It's nice to see our initials with no one else's initials on the list. We were extremely proud of our accomplishment, but Phil was laughing at us because he's been first at about every stop before this one.

We didn't stay very long at the sag stop because there were a bunch of mosquitoes there. We weren't the first one's out of the sag stop, but that didn't matter to us. We got out of the stop, rode about 3 miles, then Wade says to me, "We forgot to take pictures of the sag stop." I bet no one was surprised by that. We just laughed at each other and decided we would do it tomorrow since there probably won't be very much to see again. Anyway, we rode with Phil for awhile, looked at the time, then decided we were going to get in way too early if we kept up that pace. We let Phil go ahead and we slowed down. Only about a mile after he went ahead, we saw the rushing Arkansas River again. It was smaller than the picture we took of it before. It turned out to be a fairly good picture even though the river was so tiny. About 10 miles past the river, we saw some huge natural gas refineries. They were extremely large for being out in the middle of nowhere. From a distance, the tall stacks looked like a city skyline. We followed those along the road all the way into McPherson. When we were about 100 yards from our hotel, we took a pit stop at Braum's, which is the ice cream place we stopped at twice yesterday... It was delicious again.

Well, Choice One has done it again. They turned my office in buffet room. It looks like they're limited to pizza, so I'm proud to say that I think I'm getting better food than them. I got that one to backfire. What really got me though was that they got my kids to play in the game room. I guessed that they would get to my room, but I didn't think they could turn my kids to the dark side. By the way, Cara, Marla, and Joan are on their trip to the French Riviera, which is the trip that Cara won on the Price is Right Showcase.