Still riding

At the later part of the bike ride, your backside starts to hurt and you really try hard to find any spot on your bike seat that feels good. And you are even hoping that it will make it to the end of the day. About now it starts to get numb and starts to kind of sting. So when everyone stopped for watermelon one day, I knew if I got off the bike seat that there was no way that I’d get back on again. But as the days went on, even though you’re getting tired and your backside hurts, it’s still fun. It’s just the hardest thing to explain it, and I think if I could only use one word to try to, I think the word would be ‘freedom’. You can stop for watermelon if you want and eat 8 pieces and no one cares. Or you can go and have a frozen snicker candy bar down the road and then take a nap. Yup, no one cares. As you ride along on the highway you have conversations with people that you’ve never met before, and they’ll talk to you like you’ve seen them just last week. It’s really pretty cool and everyone is riding just to have a good time.

So let’s see, what did we all do these last couple of days? Well, Des Moines had some really cool fireworks over the river. In the past, a lot of the towns had fireworks in the over night towns, but because they’ve gotten so expensive, they’re not as common as they used to be. Some of the fireworks that we saw in Des Moines I’ve never seen before and they were really cool!

We also rode over the Red Rock Dam. Red Rock Lake is Iowa’s largest lake and the ride over the dam was 5200 feet long. I’ve seen this lake from the car, but being on a bicycle gave a whole new meaning to how high and how big it really is!

Another thing that we did was just too funny! There was a group of us standing in a beer garden (I know … your’e surprised right?) And while we were standing there, we saw a wrestling show going on. It was advertised as Midget Wrestling. First of all, I didn’t even know that you could use that word in an advertisement. And second of all, we all thought that this whole thing was just so wrong. But it was a side show and we figured that there was a couple of thousand people watching it. Then just after we thought that this was so wrong, we decided that we needed our picture taken with them. So up onto the wrestling stage we went and had our picture taken! I don’t think the opportunity to pretend you’re wrestling with little people comes around twice in a life time, so we said yes!