last couple days

The ride into Grand Island was pretty simple, only 50 miles. It's weird saying that sometimes. I mean to us a 70 mile day is easy. Anyway I only had one flat today, which wasn't so bad. We staged up at the John Deere Tractor dealership for a police escort into Grand Island. We were greeted at the Holiday Inn by a big crowd of supporters. Grand Island has been supporting the Journey of Hope for a long time. After we were introduced I got to do a TV interview with a local station. I thought for a first time interviewer I did well. It was on TV later that night, but I didn't get a chance to see it.
We had Lunch at Tammy Nance's house, who is one of our biggest supporters. We were able to take down some great steaks, play latter golf, jump on their trampoline and play some video games. It was a fun filled afternoon. You should have seen Sam Leafs face when he hopped on the trampoline, he looked like a little kid, we all did.
After Lunch we had a dance and dinner frienship visit at a local Elks club. It was a lot of fun, but very tiring. I still had enough energy to go out and explore the town of Grand Island. There were not many drinking establishments near us in Grand Island so we went to the local Godfather's pizza chain to have some drinks.
The second day in Grand Island was great too. We enjoyed some Arby’s breakfast in the morning and Runza in the afternoon. Between them we had great friendship visits.

The ride into Lincoln wasn’t so bad except for the five flat tires my pace line encountered. We stayed at the local Beta Theta Pi fraternity house. Pi Kapp is actually re-chartering at UNL because they did some bad things in the eyes of our national office. I was to appear in another interview, except I was just riding my bike. We had a two hour long dance we the local ARC center after dinner. Despite my tiredness I decided to explore the local Lincoln downtown area. We went to a local bar, which is supposed to be popular, but on a Tuesday night in the summer, we were the only customers.

Today’s ride into Omaha was interesting. A 50 mile ride turned into 60 because one of our sponsors wanted to lead us to our destination in a very different and unsafe way. Needless to say some riders were not pleased.

Today I also performed my first KOB puppet show. Everything was going well except that we sometimes alter some of the lines in the script to mix it up a bit. I said a funny line and my partner Jim Rampton could control himself from laughing, and then I started laughing. We did eventually stop and were able to finish the skit in a reasonable fashion.

Tomorrow we head to Griswald, Iowa. “Hey is this heaven… No it’s Iowa” (Field of dreams).

The ride into Iowa was very eventful. Crossing the boarder into a new state is always fun. In addition at mile 50 we started to run into a crazy rain storm. Crew made us sit in the vans at mile 55 until the rain slowed down. We had about 15 more miles to go to finish the day. The rain came back again and we were all soaked. Once we got to our lodging, which looked like a house from a horror movie I thought I would get some relief from the cold with a nice hot shower, but on the Journey of Hope it’s not a JOH shower unless it’s cold. We were able to take a nap before dinner, where we had BBQ near a local quarry.

Dexterity, what is that exactly, well it seems to me it’s the agility you have in a particular area of your body. When the other riders spoke of losing dexterity in their hands earlier in the trip I shrugged it off. However over the last week I have been losing dexterity in my left hand. It gets really frustrating because I don’t have the same strength I usually do. Sometimes its even difficult to shift my gears when I am riding. If any of the few followers of my blog have advice on my situation please feel free to give me a call.

Winterset, Iowa; the whole ride was pretty nice. We had some good conversation, good weather and a tail wind to finish the day. We have pretty nice digs at a Junior high school in Winterset; warm showers and internet. So right now I am doing laundry in town. The coin machine did not work so about 15 guys had to go next to the gas station to get about two dollars worth in coins each. The owner got a little irritated. Fortunately the laundryman is a block away from the birthplace of The John Wayne. We decided to go take a look, but none of us decided to fork over the 6 bucks for a tour of a house. We also discovered that the movie “Bridges of Madison County” was filmed in this town as well. Winterset seems to be a famous town. Were going to Des Moines tomorrow. Cya my clothes are almost dry.