America By Bicycle: Emporia, KS to Hillsboro, KS

Right now I'm sitting in the garage of Del, our surprise warm showers host for the night! He is SO great. Anyway, more on that later! I'll start at the start of the day.

We woke up happily in a bed in Ben and Jesse's home. We cooked breakfast for ourselves and for the two of them as well. Jesse didn't actually end up getting up before we left, but we ate with Ben. Eggs and oatmeal with fresh strawberries from their garden! They were really tasty strawberries... Thanks so much for having us Ben and Jesse.

We got going at about 9. We passed our last hills, and found ourselves at what we deemed The Top of Kansas. It was really beautiful. We are glad to be in Kansas.

We made a call to the McPherson post office, where we thought we had mailed the Adventure Cycling maps bringing us from central Kansas into Pueblo, CO. The man who answered was mean and unhelpful... and didn't have the package! He also said there wasn't another post office in town, which was confusing because online it said there were.. We called the number for what we thought was the second post office. The other line: "press 1 for bakery. Press 2 for catering. Press 3 for meat. Press.." Alec pressed 1.. "Hi, I have an interesting question for you..." And somehow we had ended up sending our package to a grocery store in the middle of Kansas... Pretty funny!

A little later on we passed a park with some picnic tables and an old tank and helicopter! Alec was excited...

We sat for a while, ate some snacks, and some more snacks, and continued on. Right after that there was a gas station, and then we didn't see anything for many miles. And when I say nothing I mean grass, more grass, cows, more cows (that I am convinced are buffalo in disguise..) and two random houses that were very out of place in a span of probably 40 or 50 miles. Oh and probably 5 trees. This is what we anticipate the rest of Kansas to be like...!

Right as we were deciding to go the extra 20 miles and stay in McPherson, a warm showers host, Del, who I had contacted before about possibly hosting us that night in Hillsboro (20 miles east of McPherson) but couldn't because he was on a tour of his own, called me and said he was home early an available to host!! He had had a tailwind for the past 5 days and got home two days earlier than what he'd planned -- TAILWINDS ARE AMAZING. Too bad we never have them...

But anyway, it was amazing that he called us and with perfect timing too!! We had passed his street literally 1/4 mile back, and if I'd gotten his message any later we would have been too far to want to turn around. We were SO HAPPY. Alec did a dance in the middle of the highway. Warm showers is amazing, and Del and his wife Debbie were super, fantastic, amazing hosts.

A few minutes after I got off the phone with Del, we saw a cyclist up ahead and it turned out to be him! He came out to meet us to make sure we could find the house okay, which was so nice. We got to their beautiful house and pulled our bikes into his garage, where all of Del's panniers and sleeping bag were still out because he had JUST gotten back from his own tour to South Dakota and back with a friend. We found out that he called me right after he pulled into his house from being gone for 12 days -- so incredibly nice. Del used to own a bike shop and has been a bike mechanic and a cyclist for a long time and offered to help us fix anything we needed on our bikes. He didn't know what he was getting himself into, and neither did we..!!

Every problem we had all of a sudden became magnified as we were trying to fix them, and new problems popped up too! It was actually pretty funny. While Del was trueing Alec's wheel (a "true" wheel is perfectly circular, and his had gotten out of true), which by the way takes a huge amount of skill and experience, one of his spokes broke! Of course it probably would have broken the next day though, so we were much happier to have Del there to replace it and teach us some tricks about replacing them ourselves. Then he checked out Alec's gears, cleaned our entire bikes (which is so great!) and greased everything up. Everything was wonderful and perfect, so we decided to just pump Alec's tires up... and the actual air valve on the tube snapped off... Great.. We had to take the wheel off, take the tire off and change the tube (which I did woohoo), and if that wasn't enough, the tire wasn't sitting right. That's usually an easy fix, but for SOME reason it just would not go on straight. At this point it was about 11:30 pm so we all went to bed, and Del actually ended up getting up early and wrangled with the problem for probably another hour and fixed it! He also cleaned and greased my bike, tweaked my brakes so they are perfect (yay), and rewrapped my falling apart handlebar tape. All of these things probably added up to about 4 hours of work on our bikes and at a bike shop would have cost us easily over 100 dollars (just for Alec's!). And probably more importantly, Del did this almost immediately after he got back from his own two week bike tour, before he even had time to shower or unpack his stuff!! This was so incredibly nice and we felt so lucky and happy to have had such an expert work on our bikes -- I think he had fun too!!

He had so much awesome bike stuff in his garage!

Broken spoke! They were super loose too, Del showed us.

We both learned a lot from him while he was working. HE WAS SO GREAT.

About halfway through the bike fixing shinanigans, we all showered and Del and Debbie took us out for Mexican food. The food was amazing and the company was better! After, they took us to get snow comes at The Igloo, which is a really big hangout hotspot for all ages in their small town. There were a number of people there and it was clear the Del and Debbie were great friends with all of them -- they're so great and such a great couple. (I know I've said that a lot, but that's how much I mean it!!)