Day 27: Rest Stop (Nickerson to Alexander)

Nickerson to Alexander: 96 miles

Our morning ride:

Sunrise, a few miles west of Nickerson, KS

Sunscreen-putting-on-stop = mandatory photo-op.

"Artesian well" (until the drilling started, that is)

This is what we look at every day. Sometimes there are more cows than other times. Sometimes there are even trees.

Typical Kansas scenery = oil well + corn fields

One of many oil wells

We bought canned octopus!

We ate canned octopus!

Octopus-on-a-log

Doesn't everyone eat canned octopus for breakfast? :)

After breakfast we rode through a lovely nature reserve area--birds, deer, and a lake. And we saw a coyote this morning, too!

Right before getting into Larned we passed our first feed yard. This explained the fermented wheat smell we'd been smelling from trucks passing us all morning. (Feed yard: where cattle are brought for fattening 3ish months prior to their processing.)

After our morning ride, we enjoyed the frigid a/c in a scrapbook store/coffee shop and frozen/iced chai teas. We're not sure their business model was sustainable in such a small town (or anywhere really), but we were glad they existed. We spent our break there sitting on the floor, adding photos to our blog, and researching industrial cattle farming on Google.

After buying groceries for dinner that evening (and meeting some wonderful people at the grocery store, including one former bike tourist, who hopes for further trips!) we tried to continue west. Except the cross-wind was so strong that we actually couldn't ride in a straight line! Combined with heavy traffic on one side and rumble strips on the other, we didn't feel safe continuing down the road. So we turned around, went back to the gas station we'd just passed, and asked the first man we saw in a pickup truck (our working theory is the at least 50 of the cars in Kansas are pickup trucks) for a ride 10 miles west (to the intersection with a north-bound highway). He was so kind, offering us a ride, and helpfully explaining grain farming in Kansas to us, too (which he had been involved in all his life). He was a bit concerned about us, but when he found out that we were planning to spend the night camping at a rest stop down the road, he seemed instantly reassured. Apparently the rest stop was quite nice.

Everyone, in fact, that we met over the next few hours seemed really glad that we were staying at the Alexander rest stop. The bathrooms, we heard, were really clean. We had a beer at the bar in Rush Center (the only place open in town) and leaned more about ag in Kansas, driving trucks, Midwestern beer selection, and this fancy rest stop we were heading to that evening.

"Oh, you're going to the Alexander rest stop? Oh that's alright then! It's so nice and the bathrooms are always real clean."

"I can't say much about what's west of Alexander, but you'll enjoy that rest stop."

"The woman who takes care of that rest stop takes real pride in it. It's real clean."

13 miles and we were at the mythical rest stop. It really was the nicest (read "only") thing in Alexander!

We'd give it five stars, for sure.