Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 45 (June 30) – A weird one

Yesterday was supposed to be a long, unremarkable day’s riding across Nebraska, but it turned out to be a remarkably long unremarkable ride, thanks to my failure to attend closely enough to my own directions. I do have to my credit 8000 miles of relatively error-free navigating, so far (on a bike it’s tempting to try and learn the route in advance, since pulling over to study maps is a lot less appealing a process than it is in a car), but this isn’t much consolation when you wind up 100 miles off course, a 270-mile day turns into a 400-mile day (393 to be exact), and after stopping to reboot your plans and contact your hosts for the night you arrive at the end of a 10-hour biking day instead of a five or six hour one. But we got to Omaha in the end, after a final 160-mile uninterrupted interstate blast. We usually try to pause for rest & coffee or a bite of food every 50 miles, although there have been 100-mile stretches without even a gas station, and 160 miles is probably as long as we’ve done in a single burst. On the interstate I tried to keep myself focused by attempting to recall every piece of Cockney rhyming slang I knew – no more than 20 or 30, but enough to distract me for two-and-a-half hours. The hardest part was coming into Omaha from the west and trying to guess which exit, among the myriad on offer, would take us to Rox and Dan’s house; this went gratifyingly well, and once I’d introduced Joe to the household, it was back on the bike and off to Council Bluffs, Iowa (not far – Omaha is on the state line, as is Council Bluffs), by 8:30 pm. There, Tim and Kami came up with some fine ice-packs for knees and elbows – the knees greatly improved by the last few days of nightly ice-packing – and I was just in time to watch the Germans sink the Algerians in the first knockout round of the World Cup.

Earlier in the day, still hopeful and looking forward to reaching Omaha by suppertime, we stopped off at some outposts of Midwestern Americana. After an entire TV series’ worth of gossip at the table behind us in Sissi’s Cafe in Gregory, the next featured a town-shaking siren, seemingly at 11:00 – but we’d crossed into a new time zone, losing an hour, and it was the noon siren to bring everyone in from the field for lunch, which it promptly did. (To me the siren still evokes a coming air raid, as it does to all born within range of a bombing war.) Our next stop, in Greeley, led us to a new Irish ‘pub’ (no resemblance), the only eatery in town, run by a large deaf man with no Irish to him, offering some of the worst French fries you could hope to eat. At the gas station in Greeley, when Joe revealed his origins, the kindly storekeeper seized her phone to inform the local Irish mafia (she claimed Greeley as the heart of Irish Nebraska) and bring them running across the fields in excitement. To Joe’s relief we escaped without this re-baptism.