In the morning, I found that something had come in the night and eaten all my honeybuns. Boy, was I pissed! It even left tiny footprints on the picnic table, still greasy from my honeybuns. For breakfast, I had one small can of mandarin oranges, and drank the water.

I had a pleasant ride on hard-packed gravel road that morning, through rolling hills. It had been a while since I had ridden actual hills. The humid air smelled faintly like mountain apples, and reminded me of Hawaii. I stopped at McDonald’s in Chanute for lunch. By the time I finished lunch, it was 1:45, and 55 miles to Girard. I wasn’t worried. After all, the wind was at my back.

The first 10 miles out of Chanute I took at 20 miles per hour. The tailwind was superb! Then the wind began to cool. Even better. Then the thunderstorm hit. Cats and dogs. Long, drawn-out lightning strikes.

I passed a field with three piles of burning trash. The fires were mostly branches, with a few huge logs and stumps thrown in. There wasn’t much chance of starting a wildfire, since it was raining, and the fires were in the middle of a green meadow, besides, but I was thinking that in California, someone would have been fined for leaving unattended fires. That night, I realized that those fires were actually lightning strikes! The lightning had blown large trees to smithereens, and ignited the heaps.

The rain wasn’t cold, but it certainly was thick. It felt as if I was swimming in a warm pool. I could barely see with my goggles on, so I took them off. Boy, was I glad I had Matheson brakes!

Right in the middle of the downpour, I met a cyclist going the other way. His name was John, and he was from California. He said that he actually saw the lightning hit just 50 feet away from the road! He also said that he felt the ground rumble before it happened. If I had felt the ground rumble, I would have taken the bike down and lain flat on the road immediately — that is, after wetting my pants. We exchanged advice about the roads ahead, then moved on. Standing still, we were starting to shiver.

john told me not to take the gravel alternate when i came to it; i told him to avoid the hutchinson-larned gravel stretch. note: my journal for the day recorded him as saying to take the alternate, but that must have been a typo, as a later journal entry has me avoiding the gravel alternate.

It rained all the way to Girard.

I ate at the local Pizza Hut, where the waitresses were especially nice. The younger waitress was especially sweet, and pretty, too.

As I was riding down the street, a young lady stopped her car and offered me advice. She said that there weren’t any motels in Girard (even though the town had a population of 3000), but that the city park had shelter. I thanked her, again amazed that someone would stop, unsolicited, to offer help to a stranger.

I dried my clothes at the local laundromat. Many laundromats across the country were 24 hour, since vandalism wasn’t a problem except in highly populated areas.

While my clothes were drying, I found the first authentic shave ice I had ever seen outside of Hawaii. In Girard, Kansas, of all places! At Tropical Sno, they actually shaved a block of ice, instead of just feeding ice chunks to a crusher.

That night, I slept on a picnic table in a shelter building in the city park. It was a good thing, too, as it rained viciously throughout the wee hours of the morning.