Day 24 - Garden City to Dodge City - 53 miles

After two long days with hot windy finishes, we were all pretty excited at the prospects of a low mileage day. I started out feeling kind of tired but after 15 or so miles was starting to perk up. Blame it on the repetitive nature of motel breakfasts perhaps. ;) Or just the fact that I actually was tired! The directions for the day were pretty simple: Get on Route 50 East and keep going until you get to Dodge City. So we did! At our one and only sag stop, we celebrated birthdays. Jeremy turned 21 and Marv turned 66. Cards and best wishes were delivered and songs were sung. I was actually really excited to pull into Cimarron because I got to meet two women in person that I've known over the phone for several years. I stopped off at Circle H Center Pivot Repair to meet Colleen and Kat. Ann stopped with me and we enjoyed ice cream sandwiches and popsicles and lots of cold water. Past Cimarron we stopped at the Santa Fe trail ruts. Hard to see now but it's kind of cool to imagine what it would have been like to drive wagons across the wide open praries! Next stop was the Dodge City sign where we took a short hike - not easy in bike shoes! - up to take some photos. At that point it was just a couple of miles into town and our motel. And we weren't even that tired yet! Not a lot of headwinds, not too much heat up to that point, shorter mileage - it was a nice day! Most of the riders stopped at Jimmy John's to grab sandwiches before heading to the motel. Ann and I stopped with some others as well. In the afternoon I went with Patty down to Boot Hill where they used to bury all the people that were killed in Dodge when it was a rough and tumble frontier town. They had a museum and a reconstructed main street that was fun to wander down. I got a text from Jay Jesmer saying he was in town picking up a load of meat so he came over and wandered the museum with us. Jay is from Aurora and is the guy that put together the group with whom I did my first 50 mile bike ride about 18 years ago. And now I consider 50 miles a short day! Crazy. It was fun to see him and visit for a while! 

That night in the hotel lobby, some of us were chatting with a woman from Topeka. We have a map up in the foyer and a board with messages so we know what time to meet for breakfast, loading the van, and whatever else. The map shows where we started and how far we've come and where we are headed tomorrow. She was pretty impressed with that and was asking questions. After talking a bit, she asked what I did for a living. I told her I was an irrigation engineer and she promptly extended her hand and gave me a grateful handshake. She said thank you for irrigating our crops! Her family had farm land and she talked about what a difference irrigation has made in this area and the importance of water and using it wisely. It was pretty cool. Irrigation engineering isn't exactly a glamorous career which is ok with me but we are helping farmers feed the world. It was really gratifying to have her be so effusive in her thanks. It has been really neat cycling through the fields, seeing all the crops, and the vast acreage under cultivation. It makes it all seem a little more real that I'm actually doing something that has an impact which can be easy to forget when I just stare at a computer screen all day.

I can't say I'm in love with the Kansas wind although it is a beautiful state. I asked Kat and Colleen what they liked most about living in Kansas. The answer was the same for both - you can see forever and you know what's coming. True!

Early morning horizon shot

Ann heading east

Most people are saying "Go Kettie Go!" but these two wanted me to stop in. :)

So we thought we could make out some parallell tracks about 2/3 of the way over where the grass is just darker. Might have been our imagination. But it was beautiful to watch the fields of grass blowing and rippling with the wind.

This is Kansas!

Welcome to Dodge City! Me on the left, Patty in the middle, Ann on the right. Dodge City was the hub for shipping the cattle that were driven up from Texas, dubbed the cowboy capital of the world. One figure I saw said there were 7,000,000 long horn cattle shipped from here between the years of 1875 - 1885. That's a lot of cows! I can just picture John Wayne and the Cowboys bringing in the herd!