Dinner lately has been pretty blah. It's not hard to please this crowd ... give us edible food and lots of it. An occasional vegetable is bonus. But lately it's been pretty tiresome - the same restaurant in different cities three nights in a row. Insurrection was brewing.
Tonight we were fortunate that the restaurant where we were supposed to have dinner was closed up for the month of July. So instead we went to this old 1870s hotel turned restaurant that was great. Family style, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, biscuits and gravy ...
As we were elbows spread on the table chowing on chicken the waitress came by and said - would you like some more sides? No? OK I'll bring you the rest of your chicken. Huh? Our eyes got huge ... you get half a chicken each. Wow. I started to look around me at the other patrons of this restaurant ... they were all very large people. Several of our crowd rose the chicken challenge, but I was thinking it's really incredible how much food gets served in the restaurants that the majority of Americans frequent. In many ways places like the Golden Trough (Corral) and Sizzler with its huge salad bar and spread of food works is mainstay for most Americans, while for most of us they are places we haven't gone in years.
Today was a beautiful and fun ride. We were on country roads winding North and East. Going North we had a partial fabulous tailwind. Going East we had a whopping angled headwind. Tree flapping, grass laid flat headwind. Make yourself as small as possible on the bike in the aerobars to minimize the wind. But that's OK - it was still a fun ride. At this point very little is phasing me on the bike - you just hunker down and ride through it.
We are in farm land. It looks a lot more like the east coast now that the plains. More trees. Smaller fields. I watched a farmer loading up huge round bails of straw cut from a recently harvested wheat field into a truck fitted with a huge pitchfork front. He would spear the huge bails and drop them into the slanted truck bed. Pick up 5 bails then fly over the field release the bails and let them fall in a line. Fast, efficient. A special truck designed to the task.
We rode through several small towns with one paved road - Roxbury and Gypsum. Small stores on main street along with the post office, fire station and city hall of various sizes. Maybe 2 blocks of houses behind main street - often with dirt roads.
We came into Abilene, Kansas. Their biggest claim to fame is it is the home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and hosts his presidential library, a museum and house he grew up in. He's buried there. We went there and made the mistake of going into the nice air conditioned theater for a very softly spoken 20 minute film ... kept nodding off. His home was interesting - a modest house on the wrong side of the tracks. And the library had many of his famous orders and speeches from D Day which was interesting to see his hand written edits.
Abilene is worth a stop on any travels. It had money in its day and still seems to have a community that will support interesting restaurants downtown. Much more affluent than Dodge cities and many of the towns further West. It has beautiful old mansions build by early cattle barons and later bankers and investors who moved here. At one point they thought it would be the capital of the state. Somehow this part of the state has survived the changing agricultural economy better than it's western neighbors.
We only had one washer and dryer and so it was the laundry scramble when we got in. Various stalking and moving everyones laundry along ... we all know each other so well that no one things twice about handling the others underwear. Maybe that's wrong ?
Tomorrow we have a 108 miles ride to Topeka. It's July 4th, and we're riding through many small town and probably right through the Independence Day celebrations. Should be fun.
Happy 4th!
