Day Thirty-Seven - First Month II.

Today marks one month of me leaving the comfort of Yorktown, VA, and hitting the road. It seems like YEARS ago.

I tried a new strategy this morning, set my alarm backwards. It worked, in that I woke up earlier than I have been before. I just need to learn to not press 'snooze' now... I got all my stuff together, and went down for breakfast at 8am. When I saw how the lobby was absolutely heaving, I remembered how the person at the front desk mentioned a baseball thing going on. The result of this was that there was very little food left. I managed to salvage a couple of English muffins and went back to my room. I eventually got on the road at around 9:30, I had to go to Walmart to get a couple of things.

The first 15 miles were to the edge of the map, which were pretty simple. There was a wind coming up from the south (I think that makes it a southernly wind..?) which made riding along fairly turbulent at times. Because I'm heading further west, almost all of the roads were built after the invention of the car, which makes the road network like a massive grid. I found myself travelling north for a little bit, which felt completely bizarre (not because of the direction, because of the wind). It was like cycling in a vaccume, no matter how much you pedalled you wouldn't feel any wind on your face. I got up to 30mph on flat ground with the wind behind me, before deciding that was foolish and slowed down.

The most part of my day was spent heading west though, which ended up being not too bad considering. As I said, there was a sidewind from the south, blowing you from side to side, but not affecting your forward progress too much. There were times that it shifted to slightly more of a headwind, but that wasn't too often. ALSO, Kansas isn't as flat as they'd have you believe, I was definitely going gradually uphill at times. They may not have put an elevation profile on this map, but they aren't fooling anyone. I know a hill when I see one. My right achilles was painful again earlier, I think it was because my saddle may be too high. I dropped it down a bit, and I think that's done the trick.

I'm currently in a town called Chanute, a smallish 'main street' town with all the usual. I went for a walk earlier up to a lake over the road, but despite suncream I was beginning to burn, and so came back to my room, leaving again only for pizza.

Tomorrow I'm heading to either Eureka or Cassoday, though probably not Cassoday because it'll throw me out of sync with towns, in that i'll need a short day to compensate.