What an eventful night, must have been the "adventure" in "adventure cycling". Remember the National Weather Service had announced a flash flood warning but I didn't get any rain on the road.
Wish it stayed like that... Camping under a shelter on the County Fairgrounds I woke up several times when it started to rain. Nothing bad though. The situation dramatically changed around 3am. Suddenly the sky opened up and it rained like I had never seen it before. It wasn't just millions of drops coming down, the air was also filled with mist blown by gusty wind. Within minutes streams evolved where streets had been before. Concrete blocks used as barriers now formed a pond, two feet/60 centimeters deep! Trash was floating down the road into a fence which eventually collapsed.
Even the shelter got flood half an inch deep, without my sleeping pad I would have got wet feet.
But it wasn't just water. Lightning struck down at high frequency, thunders sometimes made the shelter vibrating. One time even the light in the shelter went off for a second, caused by lightning close by. A police car stopped close to the shelter, scanned the area with its search light and turned around. The street, being spillway for a huge park, was absolutely impassable.
It went like that for hours. Several times it seemed like it would stop but nothing like that. At some point I moved to the shower house, the only dry place available. Isn't it ironic?
So I sat there, played stupid games on my tablet computer and waited. I was tired but the bench I was sitting on allowed only short naps in painful positions,
I think it was about 8 when it finally had an end. Got back to the shelter, into my sleeping bag and tried to get some sleep.
Around 10 I woke up, still tired, and figured out what to do. Staying in the shelter for another night? Motel room? Or should I risk riding into another storm?
It took me some time to make a decision but eventually I got back on the bike. Not without having a quick breakfast at McDonald's. It was 11 when I was back on the route and I saw no chance of making it to Golden City, 132km.
The new plan was Ash Grove for the night. Nevertheless I expected to get into rain and pedaled as fast as I could. After the first town I did some math and surprisingly Golden City turned out to be possible.
I needed to bike fast and reduce the stops to a minimum, which isn't my style usually, but I decided to go for it.
The first half of the mileage still had lots of short steep climbs but generally it was easy compared to the Ozarks. Met a guy from Montreal at a gas station, he was doing 100-140 miles daily, there weeks from San Francisco! He assured me it would flatten out soon and it did.
Within a few miles the landscape completely changed.
Straight roads, the few remaining hills flat long enough to take them without shifting gears, cornfields... A first sense of what's gonna come the next days. It was a joy gunning down the road, yelling with nobody to listen, enjoying the great scenery.
In Golden City my first stop was Coooky's, a café I had already heard of in Virginia. It's famous for the homemade pies, but I had a Steak and came back for pie the next morning.
At the town park I met a guy from Oregon, cycling to a marriage at the east coast. He had been working at the LHC(CERN) in Geneve the last five years!
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