Today was suppose to be a nice short half-day of riding, a ~40 mile ride to Pittsburgh, KS, to hang out with Roger (aka Lomshek), a member of a firearms forum I frequent and the owner of the local bike shop.
After Mike and I woke up and got all our stuff packing the morning, we realized that we were running low on water and should try to fill up at the next town we passed. Finding out that pretty much only the lettered highways were paved yesterday, I had to modify our route which made us jog back east a couple miles but kept us on pavement.
When we reached the next tiny town we didn't see anything but a post office, so we went inside and asked for water. The lady working there was more than happy to fill our bottles and while talking to her, she told us that we'd be going right by Prairie State Park where there was herd of free range buffalo we could see.
We headed in that direction and took a detour to a town named "Liberal" which was close to the state park. Talking to another woman at the gas station in town, we were dismayed that the roads to and from the state park were all gravel and since it was becoming early afternoon and we had places to be, we decided to stick with the pavement and pass up the park and several miles of gravel. Oh well, I'm sure I'll see lots of buffalo when I reach Yellowstone!
Mike and I rolled into Pittsburgh around 2pm and I called Roger who met us at his bike shop. It was Monday so officially it was closed, but he let us inside and took a look at our filthy, filthy bikes. The KATY trail had deposited a thick layer of limestone dust everywhere.
To rectify this, Roger had us follow him to a self car wash up the street, and like a jedi master, he whipped our bikes around and sprayed them in all sorts of different directions to clean them off but not force any water at any of the hubs or fork stem. You could tell this man has cleaned a good number of bikes.
Afterwards, we made our way back to his shop where Roger dried off our bikes and threw them up on the bike stand to check them out. He trued both of my wheels and measured my chain, which had stretched 0.9% (1% is when you need to replace) and replaced it. He then checked out Mike's bike and fixed the way his front brake was set up, but noticed that Mike's chain had stretched quite a bit more than 1%, so Roger recommended that Mike "let sleeping dogs lie" and replace the chain and rear cassette when he got to Tulsa.
With our bikes taken care of, we biked back to Roger's place (his car had roof racks but because our bikes had front racks it would have been too much of hassle to remove them to fit them on the rack) and met his wife, Rebecca, and showered. From there we loaded up his car with some guns and went to the range!
Mike had never shot a gun before and Roger was an excellent teacher. He even taught me an improved technique for gripping pistols. After introducing Mike to the smaller guns and working his way up to the bigger ones, we all tried some timed shooting maneuvers which were pretty fun. We finished up the day shooting Roger's AR15, then with the light fading we picked up and headed back to the house.
There we had a wonderful dinner with Roger's family and afterwards it didn't take me long to pass out.
Start: Richarde, MO
End: Pittsburgh, KS
Distance: 58.57 miles
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