There truly is nothing like starting the day off with a hot breakfast…the wonderful ladies of the Shoshoni Senior Center outdid themselves again making us biscuits with sausage gravy, sausage links, hashbrowns...mmm mm! Once on the bikes, though, we quickly realized the toll yesterday’s
tough ride had taken on our bodies. Andrew and I swept so we were automatically at the back of the pack (Donde and Britton also rode with us), but everyone was pretty slow moving starting off…roads were fine, winds weren’t too bad…just couldn’t get much past 12 mph or so (unlike yesterday when we were rockin 25 mph from the start!)Though we were slow we were steady…kept truckin on crew stop to crew stop. Officially traveled through the smallest town ever (yes, even smaller than Lowell, ID, who if you recall had 24, no excuse me, 23 people)…the great metropolis of Hiland, WY, population: a whopping 10 (must be hard to find a date in that town).
Just before the halfway point we had an unexpected treat…happened to come upon “Hell’s Half Acre,” an incredible mini-grand canyon setting of natural beauty. Cool tidbit (and also an apparent point of pride for many natives of Casper): Starship Troopers was shot here for its unique ‘alien planet’ look.Miraculously, after 50 miles we started to pick up the pace…perhaps our worn out bodies were finally getting warmed up! We were able to roll at about 20 mph the rest of the way. Stopped for some quick crew-chief lunch at about mile 77, before finally rolling the rest of the way into
Casper…by far the biggest town we’d seen in a while with over 50,000 peeps.We lodged up at Kelly Walsh high school after doing a patented staged double paceline for some local media. Got all showered up and relaxed a bit before dinner time.
At around 5 we packed into the vans to head over to a local park where the Kiwanis Club of Casper was sponsoring a meal with us. It was fun meeting some Wyoming natives as we munched on some delicious smoked beef brisket…my tablemates were some rather strongly opinioned politicos; our riveting convo centered on the politics behind the politics of the Wyoming senate seats. One of the main Kiwanis guys was a pretty take charge fella who got rather uncomfortably ‘close’ to some of the guys when he was talking to them…ahh the things you’ll remember…
After dinner we rolled back to lodging to get changed up. Pretty much everyone went out on the town (cuz tomorrow’s a day off...yayaaaa). Our scene for the night was “Old Chicago,” a place very similar to Uno’s which had a plenty big bar to suit our needs. I played some bar trivia games with Jake and Farley while sippin on an impressive variety of hefeweizen beers. Good time all around…called it a night around 1ish…
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