Day 25: Toronto Lake to Newton

Toronto Lake to Newton: 106 miles

We awoke to a beautiful sunrise over the lake. 

After packing up, we thought we could take a shortcut back to the route... Turns out, that are a lot of gravel roads in Kansas! Fourish bonus miles later, we were back on the trail.

Breakfast in Eureka, Kansas... clearly full of brilliant ideas ;)

Highlights of the ride:

--Meeting a fun older couple from Kalamazoo, Michigan who were self-sagging their tour. They have two vehicles (one is a camper) and drive west then bike east every day. Lots of gas, but we guess it kinda makes sense... Cool idea, at least!

--Guestbooks at many of the little diners and had stations. Just as we felt like we were being collected by the little kids in Appalachia, so too do we feel collected here. This time, it feels much more organized and calm.

--Music. We committed to listening to music on our phones for the last forty miles because the landscape was proving to be less than scintillating. Dancing while riding was pretty fun. (Yes, we made sure we could still hear the cars!) (Not that there were many cars to hear!)

--Cornfields, cattle, soybeans, some wheat. Fences. Oil rigs.
--The sound of crickets pinging off our spokes as they threw themselves into our wheels. And the sound of them thwacking our legs before falling under the wheels if our bikes. Ugh. We have never seen so many crickets, nor have we killed so many macroorganisms in a single day. (We spoke to someone about this later and they said that the pesticides that farmers use make the crickets starve so they flock into the roads and start eating each other. That is incredibly disturbing.)

We arrived in Newton, Kansas, hot and sweaty. Right before reaching our hosts' home we saw a sign for half-off margaritas. Mad margarita cravings ensued. Then were served homemade margaritas immediately upon arrival to our warmshowers hosts' home!

New record!