Good afternoon from Overbrook, Kansas!
It is a balmy 95 degrees or so and Jenny and I are enjoying various air conditioned places here in this small Kansas town. We had a nice lunch of salad, apples, dried fruit, pretzels, granola, and Oreos (A big thanks to Aunt Sandy for helping us stock up with good food!). It was nice of them to let two stinky, tired people have lunch at their station. Now we are hanging out in the library downtown to avoid riding in the middle of the day.
We have been expecting hot weather and we certainly got a taste of it today. We were a little suprised that the hills we encountered in Missouri have continued in Kansas. We'll see if it flattens out in the next day or two. Tonight we plan to camp outside of town at a state park (Osage Lake).
We had a bike conundrum which thankfully didn't come up until just outside of Kansas City. I was planning on taking our bike in to get it cleaned up, tighten the timing chain, and get a new chain in the back, but as we were coming into KC the chain kept slipping off the middle chain ring. Jenny noticed that there was a section on the chain ring that was pretty dramatically bent and the chain was not hitting flush on 4-5 cog teeth. We struggled up some big hills in our big chain ring because I didn't want to shift into that gear and potentially make things worse. It looked pretty bad so I was nervous as we took it into the bike shop on our day off in KC.
Sandy took us to Bike America in Lee's Summit, MO and it turned out to be a great shop. Kevin looked at our situation and seemed to be confident that he could make things right. We left the bike with him and headed out for a day of seeing the sights in Cow Town, a.k.a. Kansas City. He called us in about an hour and said he had fixed it up...we were very impressed with his speed and when we went to pick it up, you could barely tell the skip had been there. He put it in a vise to straighten it out and also had to grind down one of the cog teeth where the metal was not cooperating. The new chain looks nice on the bike and he cleaned up our rear cassette. All day today the bike has worked really well. We are grateful for the skill that bike mechanics posess and we thank Kevin at Bike America for getting us safely on the road again. They also made an in-kind donation to 5,000 for Thirst by not charging us for labor. Go see them if you're ever in Lee's Summit. Incredibly, that's really been the only major bike issue on the whole trip. We have a wierd creak that shows up every once in a while when were going up a big climb, but I don't think that's major. Other than that, Firefly has held up extremely well!
We got to see some neat sights in KC and we're grateful that Sandy and Grandma were able to show us around. We had some KC BBQ downtown at the open air market, visited the restored Union Station, and stopped by the American Jazz Museum. It was a great day and it was capped off with another awesome experience. My cousin, Julie, and her husband, Wayne, invited us out for dinner and a ride on their new boat. Their two kids (Hailey and Ethan), Julie, Wayne, Sandy, Jenny, and I piled into the car, grabbed Subway sandwiches, and headed out to Smithville Lake. It was a beautiful night and there were not many boats out. After dinner and a few dives off the boat, we busted out the water skis. It has probably been 8 or 9 years since I last waterskied so I was a little nervous that I would embarass and/or hurt myself. But I got up on the first try and had a great time. I took some hard spills because I got a little too confident and tried to jump the wake : ) Julie and Wayne each got to ski and as the sun was setting Jenny decided to give it a try. She did awesome and got up on her third try for a short run. It was getting dark so we cruised back to the boat launch, but I have a feeling that Jenny will be up and carving the next time we get to go water skiing. Thanks to Julie, Wayne, Sandy, and the kids for a very memorable evening : ) We really hope we get to see our siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins' kids, etc. more often. Among many other things, this trip has shown us how important family is and how great it is to make memories with the people we love.
OK, I've stalled long enough we should probably get to our campsite. I will try to post an updated fundraising total soon. As for mileage, we are right at 3,500 miles!! If any of you know any people in western Kansas/eastern Colorado let us know. Thanks for all your prayers and support.
Love,
Scott and Jenny
No comments:
Post a Comment