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This morning was extremely cold in the beginning, just like the previous day. I hadn’t brought anything with long sleeves, nor any jacket, so I just had to freeze. After a couple hours, as the sun got higher in the sky, things warmed up. Everyone who had put on jackets and long pants could be seen stopping alongside the road and stripping them off.
We began our ride about 6:30 AM, and that was normal for us all week. We would get up, take down the tents and pack them away in our bags. Then we would carry our bags to the semi-truck that hauled all the bags from one overnight town to the next. They change trucks each year I think and this year it was a UPS truck.
Jeff had decided on the first day that his goal was going to be to get to the overnight town as soon as he could. By doing this he could get his bag right when it was unloaded from the truck, and get prime choice of a camping space, somewhere close to the truck. This would minimize the distance we had to carry our bags.
I set out to get to Fort Dodge as fast as I could too, and arrived at about noon. Turns out that I was only a few minutes behind Jeff. We were plenty early because the truck didn’t unload the bags until about 1 PM that day. Check out the pictures of all the bags in the truck and then on the ground.
We camped right in front of the Fort Dodge High School on Monday night. There was a shaved ice vendor about 50 feet from our tent so I had two or three of these treats before the afternoon was over.
We showered right at the high school. Boy, was that shower hot. The water was scalding, which in turn caused the locker room to be like a sauna. We all put just enough clothes on after the shower to be presentable, then stepped out into the hallway to finish dressing in slightly cooler air.
All food and activity were far enough away from the campground that we had to take a shuttle bus. We first got off the shuttle near a Lutheran church that was having all you can eat spaghetti. It was good, and I topped off my meal with a piece of rhubarb pie.
We got back on the shuttle and rode downtown. We had set our minds on watching a movie at the local theater. After finding it and deciding which movie we wanted to watch we laid on the floor for about 45 minutes and waited.
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