Week 3-Iowa

It is my job to tell you the story as it happened, and not to deprive you of any instances that you may find amusing or beneficial. This means this is not a children’s memo, or for anyone easily offended. My family, I know you’ll still love me. My friends, the same. Future followers, don’t pass judgment, just enjoy the ride, as I know I will. Friends, family, and future followers; feel free to pray for me. God knows I’ll need everything I can get.

Week 3

May 5-May 11

So we wake with at our hosts house on the Mississippi.  A few interesting tid-bits came from the night before.  This guy, who was a retired, had completed two 3-century rides.  One was a try for a four century in one day, but when he got to mile 350 his leg started to cramp and once he got to mile 360 he had to retire for the day.  He and his wife had also biked from Pacific Ocean to Atlantic Ocean in 17 days.  These things are wild to me, as I have no interest in ever biking these types of distances.  Still they are very impressive feats.  

Once our ride continues on in the morning, we are shooting for Iowa City, and will cross the Mississippi River at Davenport.  After biking a few miles, we notice our host/guide at the moment was, as Lauren put so well, aloof.  It seemed like this dude didn’t pay attention to shit.  The night before as he relived his glory years by sharing his neat stories, and they were neat, he had told us how many bones he had broken, broken helmets, things of this nature, and his list was extensive.  After riding behind this guy for twenty miles the day before and then over forty on this day, it was clear as to why he had broken so many bones.  He talked with his hands waving every which way, swerved over traffic lanes, and just seemed generally unaware of his body in space.  The first five miles or so Lauren and I were snickering about this newly obvious discovery.  About ten miles later I could feel the heat being produced from Lauren’s anger through her back and from ten or more feet away.  Not only did our now guide swerve like a total drunk, he was pressing along at around seven miles an hour.  Lauren is watching her GPS the whole time and just teaming with all sorts of bad thoughts as this aloof retiree leads us through towns while our miles to the next destination stays the same.  He was showing us things.  I like seeing things and so does Lauren but on a bike, at seven miles an hour when you’re trying to make around eighty, is not the right time.  We’ve been in this situation before.  The super awesome thing about my recognition of Lauren’s current state is that she never had to say a word, or make a gesture for me to feel her anger.  As we pull to a Long John Silvers because there was nothing at all within two miles Lauren proclaims “I’m fucking telling him.”

She was kind about it and just needed to blow off some steam, and eat.  I’ve also noticed an undeniable irritability associated with Lauren’s level of hunger.  This is the day I started to make the joke to her about, and in my best rapper meets children’s story book reader voice “Feed the bear; you gotta feed the bear or she gets angry.  Don’t forget to feed the bear.” The bear was angry, but things feel into place rather easily.  Once back on track, he takes us to a more main highway and we proceed to have what is one of the more exhilarating experiences of my trip yet.  Going down an old highway with twenty mile an hour winds to our backs, we averaged around twenty two mph for over an hour.  It was so much fun and compounded with the fact that I have never seen anything like the new landscape in the new state, Iowa, that we were in it was pretty bad ass.  Stopped at a Subway for lunch and our guide split back the other way,  Lauren and I on our on in corn country with warm weather and the wind to our back.  Beautiful.

We roll into Iowa city and it was noticeably younger than any town we’ve been in yet.  It was interesting to see all the people out age doing things out in the streets and fields.  Sports, exercise, games, sculling; we didn’t know Iowa’s largest university was in Iowa city.  We got to our host’s house and have some seriously amazing company, and I finished my two finals this night and wrapped up my first year of grad school.  The company was great.  We had a compilation effort for dinner where I participated and It was awesome.  Lauren and I ate a half a gallon of ice cream by ourselves.  The hosts ate ice cream too, but she and I had at least a half gallon between the two of us.  Our host also helped us out a great, great deal, as Lauren and I had a looming problem with only one real answer; we were running out of warm shower hosts as the population gets thinner and thinner as you go from Iowa to Nebraska and then into Wyoming.  The population just gets less and less which means that warm shower hosts become farther apart.  Iowa had a decent dry stretch but our host had a sister the next town over and a cousin in Nebraska that she hooked us up with.  Awesome timing.  

I made some protein pancakes in the morning and our new host also guides us out of Iowa CIty.  She was seriously awesome and her husband too.  We watched the Iowa State Sculling Team practice off their front porch all night while we prepped and ate dinner, and then she helped us with future boarding, then lead us out of town.  She was too cool.  

We roll out of Iowa City heading for Grinell to stay at her sisters, and the day started out as beautifully as the second half of our day before had went…Well almost.  I learned two very important lessons on this day.  The first is that if anyone ever told you that Iowa was flat, just don’t trust them with your kids, because they are a fucking liar.  Second lesson is that Iowa has a specific name for paved roads; they call them interstates.  We had more hills and gravel roads than I ever would have imagined.  It was all loose pack gravel too because it was freshly laid.  I remember our first stretch of dirt road for the day had a line of gravel set off center.  I told Lauren “It looks like we’ll be meeting a scraper soon. This gravel was just dumped by the truck so the scraper’s gotta come spread it out”  It’s a curse being right all the time, it really is.  Three miles later, there’s the spreader, and our day just got a lot worse.  Dirt roads are great on a bike when they are dry.  They are almost better than pavement sometimes because it is packed so hard, and almost everything is more enjoyable with a dirt road thrown in.  Gravel roads on the other hand are a total freaking nightmare.  No traction and tons of sliding on the only things you can do.  Going super slow is the only remedy and going slow sucks.  Lauren’s tires are way better than mine except in gravel.  At one point our gravel road even turned into a grass road.  In Iowa they have these signs that say “Level B Maintenance” and “Travel at Own Risk”.  We had already been so frustrated with the gravel that the grass road just made us laugh.  It’s funny how over exposure to a bad thing can resolve into laughter.

We get to Grinell and have more awesome hosts with awesome food, ice cream, and peach pie.  Life is good. I lied before; this was actually the night I finished my two finals, if it means anything.  From Grinell we head to Des Moines.  I had only ever heard two things about Iowa before being there and the first was it was flat(flat fucking wrong) and the second was a heavy metal band out of Des Moines that I listened to a lot in my youth.  THe ride from Grinell to Des Moines was rough with hills and more gravel and no paved roads, known as interstates, made our lives easier.  It’s not fair to say there were no paved roads, but a lot of our time was wasted on the gravel stones.  Dirt is fine, gravel is crime.  We finally make it to Des Moines and I get a flat tire right outside of the what we had later found out to be the ghetto.  Let’s get real though; a ghetto?  It’s fucking Iowa.  Bike tire flat is fixed in twenty to thirty, and we are only 3.2miles from our next hosts house.  We were heckled more on this 3.2 mile stretch than the rest of our trip combined.  I hate being heckled and I also hate confrontation and Lauren has no problem slinging the middle finger and shouting back at people.  I like to stay safe and pretend nothing is going on.  I always have a fear that my retaliation would bring about my demise, or at least end with me getting hit with a Slushy.  Lauren doesn’t care.  I think it’s kinda hot looking back on it, but in the moment I just wish it would all go away.  In between all the dead corn and the anger, no fuckin’ wonder this band wrote heavy metal all the time.  I’d go nuts in Iowa.  This didn’t stop things from being enjoyable, as when we got to our hosts house, it was sick.  Such a nice pad, and such nice people.  Another compilation dinner and this was borderline unbelievable.  Lauren had mentioned something about mac&cheese and this host whipped it up from scratch.  Scratch mac&cheese isn’t really something you whip up because it’s Wednesday.  It was awesome, as was the whole meal and the company.  After chatting the husband, a therapist and manager of a large therapy company, tells us that given our interest, he would like to take us to the hospital he works at and get us to meet the CEO of the hospital.  We are interested in covering some ground and still have the goal of getting to the west coast as quickly as possible.  The wife offers to drive us to our next host’s house and take us to sit with the CEO of the hospital.  Count us in. 

Lauren is accepted into medical school, and I am in a masters program where I hope to make a move into the hospital industry after putting all my prior focus in hospitality.  Having the opportunity to talk to this guy is cool for the both of us, and he still practices as a doctor, while also taking a week long trip to South America to educate the residents at his place and also help out in less fortunate areas.  This is more of what Lauren is interested in, as she has spent time in South America, Rwanda, and North Carolina trying to help what is officially termed as the under served.  It was super neat to sit down for an hour and just talk about things that are happening.  I’ve come to realize that as much as I love the hospitality industry and the time that I spent in it, these services only give people things. I don’t relay care for things, where as the services provided by the health care field give people necessity based items.  The hospitality field can help folks as well, but I like the direct impact of giving to people in need.  Maybe I haven’t figured the whole thing out yet either though.

After talking for a while the wife host takes us to a Vietnamese restaurant in Des Moines, and then hauls us to our next host location.  This is a pretty long drive and the weather was unfavorable for biking so this was an optimal situation.  Lauren and I slept more in the car ride than we were awake.  It’s amazing how much you can eat when you are traveling over sixty five miles a day on a bicycle and it is also amazing how tired you can be without realizing.  People say you tend to normalize and the muscle soreness goes away after the second week.  I have yet to agree with either of the above statements.  My legs have never been so sore that I felt limited but there is indeed a constant ache and tenderness, specifically when I move my legs in certain directions.  Even with two rest days in a row things can still feel very tender.  We’ll see if time heals as my legs strengthen even more, or if it is just the price ow pay to play the game.  

We arrive at our new host house after a kind of quick drive.  It is now apparent that warmshowers.org is saving us a bunch of money while also adding to our comfort levels.  It is an interesting concept that people are so willing to help total strangers, but there is a common ground shared between host and traveler.  Worst case scenario you can talk about the act of cycling.  Many people want to talk about the bikes themselves.  I haven’t even really rode a bike since I was fourteen or fifteen so this sort of talk is either over my head or something I just don’t generally care about.  Our new host house seems interesting.  They told us to enter even though no one was there.  We hung for a little while before the wife and daughter showed up; this became a moment where I realized something deep in my head.  The wife was so soft spoken that she was barely audible.  I found myself asking her to repeat a few times as she was to quite to hear.  Once I had observed this women’s tender voice for about thirty minutes I had realized that my ears had a deep ring.  Road noise is something I had taken for granted on the trip.  Between the wind and the traffic there is a lot of noise received over the course of a day, not to mention a few weeks.  It was the same sound you hear in your head the day after a concert or a NASCAR event.  If you’ve ever experienced these types of events without ear plugs then you know what I am referring to.  As each word left here mouth the more the rings level would elevate.  I was very appreciative of this quite time.  A storm was rolling through this farm property of Iowa and the rain on the barn out back was such a beautiful sound after letting my ears calm down for a few hours.

The husband entered almost two hours later.  He bikes to work most days; a near 13 mile trek in one direction and irregardless of weather unless it is just too cold.  He was funny, and very loud.  He sounded like the guy from the “I Love You Man” during the slappin’ de bass, skit.  After being around this character an hour it was very clear as to why his wife was so soft spoken.  He had said the he was going to ride to Omaha with us the next day and camp outside of the city.  “Sweet; we love company.”

We had planned our route and things were underway before we started, at least in our minds.  The host, being that this was his turf, knew a better route, so that is the way we took.  Better is a term of relativity, and it was clear that his relationship with the term “better” had a different meaning than ours.  The one true unfortunate issue of our journey is time.  We have a deadline for Lauren to get back so she can start med school well prepared so most of our days are spent trying to get as far as possible in as little time as possible.  Our planned route had us going around 61 miles.  At the end of our journey is was 79miles logged.  If someone tells you they are going to add nearly 33% of anything to your day it could be god or bad.  When pushing a bike with a bunch of weight across the ground is what you are adding to your six hour day just turned into eight or more.  Lauren was a bit aggravated at the end of our day with good reason.  This was one of the first times that I had also shared her sentiment.  

The tide of our day had started to turn around lunch time when we realized that our host had us on the long route.  Whatev’s.  We’re already doing it now so let’s just keep on.  Prevailing winds against us, miles getting added on to the trip as well as time, and a very talkative host.  I’ve had to wait a few weeks to write this portion, as I needed to think about how to present the information without coming off as a bit of a cynic.  This guy and I enjoyed each others company the night before and he really is a great guy, we just have very differing opinions.  I don’t want to take anything away from a decent dude because we were like oil and water but we had no business being together.  On two separate occasions I had told him that we had no business talking about the subjects that we were.  He obliged rather easily as I think it was clear to him as well that we needed to change the subject.  It started with some issues regarding Iowa.  He had talked about how beautiful Iowa was the whole time.  His opinion, but mine is that Iowa is the ugliest state that I have been to yet. If you like looking at dead corn on a rather boring landscape with no back drop, Iowa is your place.  His opinion; I got it.  He started to talk about how RoundUp is non toxic and how you can drink it, and how commercial farming doesn’t poison the water table.  Iowa cities have to release warnings of high nitrate levels because infants die from drinking the water that comes from the tap.  This is a fertilization issue, but with the RoundUp he had stated that it was fit for human consumption and saw a farmer drink it once.  I told him that this farmer had an obviously lower value on his life than I did.  This guy argued that you get no tax deductions when you buy a house; he was fifty seven and had been paying rent his whole life.  If you are reading this don’t ever do this to your kids.  Go buy a house and watch your net worth grow and save money on taxes.  This guy was beyond outspoken against gay marriage but couldn’t understand why people had an issue with marrying your first cousin.  “Doesn’t say anything about it in the Bible.”  You may be right, Mr., but seriously; WTF?  He had told us this ridiculous story about how he had got his cousin into biking and that they had joked with their families about if anything ever happened to their spouses that they would move to a state where marrying your first cousin was legal.  Said cousin was in a huge domestic violence issue with all sorts of physical and verbal abuse, but they couldn’t divorce because then they would go to hell.  Ain’t that a bitch?  After we got to Omaha Lauren had pointed out that he wouldn’t talk on the phone around us and he was super sketchy and secretive about his conversations.  One time he told us to ride ahead and he would meet us in a couple miles so he could talk on the phone.  Most people don’t keep secrets about talking to their wife on the phone.  The seed had been planted and we had a consensus that this guy was bangin’ prostitutes on the reg during his camping trip.  The last thing I said to him as we parted ways was “Don’t let any of them wild women get ya at the campground.”  Who knows the truth, and it is not fair of us to make these speculations, however at this point and time this is where we were.  He was a total baller, though, and biked this entire day towing a trailer on a single speed.  The conditions were terrible, and this was, and still is undoubtedly my least favorite day of the trip.  There was no flat ground for the entire day, the wind was 25mph plus against us, the road had a crack every 10 yards for the whole 79miles, and this guy made me realize I might be an introvert.  He talked more than Spike; way more.  Now he wasn’t rude, at all, and despite our differing opinions and the hopefully false assumptions of infidelity, he really was a great dude.  We just weren’t meant to hang for long.  9 hours later, I was ready to pull in front of the tractor trailers that were on the un-fucking-believably busy highway he had taken us on.  What a guy; knew the way there, took us the “scenic” route on the busiest fucking highway that wasn’t an interstate, which had no shoulder, were we were heckled the most of our entire trip.  Trucks in the opposing lane were even honking at us, people were yelling, and the wind never stopped.  Mr., at the end of this day I can say with full conviction, I hope our paths never have to cross again.

We pulled into Omaha, met our new hosts, and things were awesome.  They’ll start the next week.