Day 39 (7/10): Dodge City, KS; 65 Miles

Woke up pretty refreshed…got to even sleep in a little because today’s ride was pretty short. After some delicious hotel continental breakfast (Belgian waffle…mmmm) we were on the road. Had the same nice wide should all day so it was smooth sailin all the way into Dodge. Couple highlights on the ride: most of the road is lined with huge patches of beautiful sunflowers (the state flower of Kansas)…got to see a cool plane crop dusting corn fields…and took a sweet pic at the Dodge City sign in front of the “Magnificent Seven.” One BIG low point of the ride: the smell!!! As opposed to the cattle ranches out west which birth the calves, Kansas is home to the feed lots that fatten em up. So instead of a few hundred cows over hundreds of acres, you get 10,000 cows all in just a few acres…and man do they reek. Every so often a “poop truck” (as we called em) would drive by and just hit us with a wave of awfulness…yuck.

We rolled into town and lodged up at the Dodge City Community College and got showered up for lunch. It was a short walk over to the school cafeteria, where members of Phi Theta Kappa, an international honors society, sponsored us for some good ole’ fashion school style lunch…even had the trays with all the little sections in em! Highlight of the meal was the ice cream cones at the end.

Not a whole lot going on here in Dodge, so we were actually free after lunch…with a small stipend provided by Grant Elpers (who sponsored our meal at the Golden Corral last night) to get dinner with. So after some relaxation and a little post office action I headed out with a group of guys to wrestle up some grub.

After tooling around the small touristy town for a bit we ended up at Casey’s Cowtown…a local steakhouse type joint. We couldn’t tell if the waitress didn’t like us, or just was kinda mean, or actually did like us and had an awkward demeanor…who knows…but we got through it. At the top of the menu were the “Crown Jewels” aka Calf Fries aka we had no idea what they were…so I asked and in a rare flash of an excited smile she replied “wanna try em?”….”well sure!” So she brings out a plate of what look like little round deep fried popcorn chicken pieces…at which point we had a sneaking suspicion that we were about to eat what our Texas teammate Geren referred to as “Rocky Mountain Oysters” and sure enough…they were calf testicles! Felt great knowing that I had an animals balls sitting in my stomach…but hey they didn’t taste half bad…kinda like chewy calamari.

Dinner pretty much marked the final excitement that is Dodge City…so I think I’ll spend the rest of the night working on much overdue thank you notes!