Day 32 – Oasis in the Grass Desert

Eureka, KS to Newton, KS – 74 miles

Yesterday we woke up in Eureka’s city park around 8 am, packed up, and went up to the Sonic for breakfast.  We sent a text to Max and Julia, but didn’t hear back from them so we decided to head out.  The route was extremely remote with only a couple very small towns on the way.

In general the riding was pretty good.  Really flat and we had either a cross wind or a tail wind all day so we could keep a pretty decent pace.  The landscape is incredibly vast and you can see for miles.  I took this panoramic to try to capture the expansiveness of the landscape.  To give some scale, if you look closely you can see Dries on the right side of the road a good ways out in the distance.

By afternoon things had heated up quite a bit.  We took a rest stop in Cassoday to refuel and refill water bottles.  From Cassoday to Newton there was a stretch of 38 miles with no services, so we wanted to be prepared for a long stretch of unsupported hot miles.  As we were leaving Cassoday we saw Max and Julia.  Apparently they got a bit later start than we did.

After the 38 miles into Newton we were psyched to get to the Newton Bike Shop.  It’s starting to become somewhat of a legend on the Trans America Trail.  It’s close to a halfway point for the route and they cater to long distance touring cyclists complete with bunks in then back for us to crash while we get our bikes worked on.

They offer a good special for touring cyclists passing through on a complete tune up, lube, and one of a kind bike wash.  It felt good to get all the gunk off my drive train and have a shiny bike again.  They even noticed that my front rack mount was rubbing on my headset and had already worn through a good portion of it.  If it had gone much longer it likely could have cracked making steering difficult to impossible until I got to another bike shop to get it swapped out.  Hopefully it isn’t worn too far through and can survive for the rest of the trip…

We spent the afternoon and night treating ourselves to the free local microbrew they have on tap and grilling out on the grill they have available people staying at the hostel.  Awesome people, awesome place, and a great spot to take a rest day before we set out into the rest of the grass desert that is Kansas!