Day 29 (7/21): Larned, KA to Cassody, KA (159 miles)

Days mileage: 159 miles
Well, well, well….those ducks in the duck pond kept me up all night long….It was a flock of about 30 quakers and there was a handful in there that seemed to have a problem with quaking while they slept. It was so damn annoying and I could not get to sleep with such noises jumping in, out, and through me eardrums…so, when 4 AM rolled around I decided I’d just get up, pack up my gear and head out towards the east…

I ate some pasta for breakfast (blah), strapped on my headlamp and put on my neon orange vest and headed out….Once the sun started to shed light upon my surroundings I could see that I was now surrounded by a marsh land with tons ands tons of waterfowl (well, more like 3 or 4)….there was a slight tailwind nudging me ever so gently when suddenly I saw one of those road-block signs blocking my intended direction of travel…

I went around it to see what the silent commotion was all about and soon saw that the road suddenly ended…or, became a small cliff, or, was washed away to some other Kansas county….there was, basically, 15 yards of road missing which meant I would have to take alternate roads to get around this mess…I glanced around and realized I was surrounded by marshlands, barbed wire fences, bovines, and crappy Kansas roads…

I looked at my maps and decided I ride north and try to get around the lack of road….after five miles the road turned to sand and I cursed the sky, and myself, for an excess number of minutes…there was no way I’d be able to ride in sand (and why did they use sand in the first place for country roads?). I had no choice but to turn back around and think things through again…a wasted 10 miles of effort that got me nowhere nearer to getting to the other side of the washed out road…

I reassessed things and concluded the only option was to get over the barbed wire fence, wade through the marshland, ford the raging stream, get back over the barbed wire fence, and continue on with my life….

And so it began…I tested out the fence to see how much give it would have if I tried to tight rope walk on it…it was damn secure…I hoisted my bike up and heaved it as high as I could over the fence…It, naturally, got snagged and caught on the fence and toppled down and over into the marsh.

I was soon to follow…though my shorts got snagged while falling down and off of the fence…The herd of bovine stopped and stared at me wondering what I was intending to do next….well, I brushed me self off, made sure nothing broke on bike and slowly pressed through the ankle-deep marsh muck and used my fly-rod case as a means to clear a path to walk through the chest high marsh grasses.

Then I came to the stream that was pretty high still….I tested it out before carryin my bike across….it only came up to my crotch area and I sank down a bit more d/t the silt making up the riverbed….whatever. I had no choice…I hoisted the bike onto my shoulder and started to wade across the stream….i then had to wade thru the much and grasses to get towards the barbed wire fence and get back across…this time, instead of lifting my bike up I figured it’d be best to take my time and unload all the gear and just toss it up and onto the road above me…well, this worked fine and dandy until gravity got in the way and prevented my might from throwing the gear farther than I desired…my tent rolled back down the hill and into a flooded area/gutter….
All I could do was stand in the blazing heat and stare at my tent bag sittin in a nice big, deep pool of water. I was more careful with where I tossed the rest of the gear and more careful in getting over the fence as not to snag myself again…

The whole ordeal (riding 10 extra miles, getting thru marsh, etc) took an extra 1.5 hours or so….good thing I got up at 4 am right?

The rest of the day was a usual Kansas day (see any other entry from Kansas section). The big difference though was the changing in landscape. Yes, even my weary and biased eyes could see the subtle changes in the way the land was starting to roll, the roads actually had turns to them, trees were starting to appear in closely-knit clusters…I wiped a gallons worth of sweat from my brow and pedaled on into the headwinds…

I didn’t stop riding until 830pm when I pulled into a town called Cassody…I then started to think about the book “Once A Runner…”…fitting enough. I def missed running and even though I had just biked 160 miles I yearned for a pair of running shoes to get back that good ol’ running feeling.

I had to settle for left over pasta from that morning for dinner and retreated to the familiar walls of my tent…the only things that seemed to be familiar to me anymore...