Blue Skies

Day 36: Fremont to Sioux City / Sergeant Bluff, Iowa

August 11, 2008 on 4:56 pm | In Family, Fellow Cyclists, Injuries / Accidents, On Tour |

Monday wasn’t the greatest day ever. It started out alright; I woke up relatively refreshed from sleeping in the Lutheran church overnight. People’s alarms had started going off some time after 5 AM, which I promptly ignored until mine went off some time later. On stepping outside I found that the temperature had cooled off a little, although it was still quite humid.

We missed one of the turns along the way, which worked out fine since we were planning to go to Decatur where there was a bridge across the river to Iowa and the wrong turn took us along faster roads. Later on a number of cyclists also didn’t turn where they were supposed to, but they don’t get quite the same advantage. A ways down the route we got a call from the first SAG stop since there was a cyclist who was having trouble. We headed back and picked up the cyclist and brought them across the bridge into Iowa and a ways further into the route.

The portolet was due for a cleaning and emptying again, so it was going to show up a bit later at its assigned location. In case some early cyclists went past that point too early, we parked our van a short distance along the route into Iowa.

While parked there we got a phone call that a cyclist had an incident with a motor vehicle just across the toll bridge in Nebraska. We quickly packed up and headed over to the scene. It turned out that Eritia was cut off by a vehicle turning into a gas station. Eritia’s ok, and she’s written a bit about in on her blog (click here). She was pretty shook up, but after sitting in our van for a bit to recover (and to shelter from a short rain shower that happened to come our way), she decided to cycle to the destination of the day anyways. Another cyclist had helped her by checking the bicycle and ensuring that it was still road-worthy. We ended up swapping out her front wheel with a spare that we had in the support van since her front rim was bent from the impact with the vehicle. Everything else checked out alright.

We had some interesting bike swapping happening throughout the day. One cyclist had one of his cranks fall off, so he couldn’t use his bike anymore. Fortunately he was only a few kilometers from camp and, after checking with me, borrowed my bike which just happened to be loaded up last in the gear truck. His bike ended up on the top of the portolet SAG van, which was the last support stop for the day. Later in the day, we got another call from a cyclist who had a spoke break on him. In this particular case, his wheel went completely out of true, and the wheel was no longer ridable. We didn’t have a spare rear wheel, since our extra one was still on loan to another cyclist, so we loaded up his bike and headed down the road. We stopped at the last support stop, and noted that the wheel of the first cyclists bike was still usable, so we swapped it out and got the second cyclist on the road as well.

Our vehicle was the sweep SAG for the day, so we didn’t get back into camp until 5:30 PM or so. I checked to see where Eritia was, but she had been taken away by Barb to her house to get some proper rest. That night many of the cyclists ended up sleeping in the gym of the adjacent community center which was also the home of a local church.