Day 36: Out of the frying pan & into the fire

91.31 mi max 29.0 6:05.54 avg 15.0

My tent is a sauna. You can tell EXACTLY where I've been sitting on my Thermarest. Breathing is an effort. It is so hot and humid. Everything I own is wet. Even my laundry which I dried in the dryer is back to being damp.

When we get to Cleveland, Mark, Christy & I are getting a hotel room and we'll just stay there.

It's so humid that I'm considering taking Benadryl to get to sleep.

The ride: hot & humid. I coasted behind Justin for 40 miles, and that was pretty sweet. After checkpoint, though, I started out on my own and was stopped (taking pictures of llamas) when Justin went by. Later on, I tried to latch on to Christy & Mark but I was really wiped after the day. We did go through Topeka, an Amish community. There were a lot of Amish on the roads today, riding their bicycles. A lot of them have phone booths on their property - they don't like the modern stuff in their homes, intruding on their old way of life and disrupting focus on the family. However, I did see some farmers today, with a horse drawn hay baler, but the baling part was run with a generator. For the most part, the day was flat. We were told that the biggest climb would be up the I-55 overpass. Not the most interesting day for scenery. So much of America, whether we'd like to believe it or not, is still farmland.

The mosquitoes here are the worst I've seen on the trip. And, for that matter, the bathrooms rank pretty low too. The showers are in a separate building. Each dimly lit chamber has two sections, one presumably for changing and the other for showering. Not that it matters much - there is so much moisture in the air that you would do as well to shower with your clothes on. As you enter the once-(possibly?)-peach-colored cell, the heavy door swings shut with a heavy, foreboding boom. The urge to run out of the shower is overwhelming - when you turn on the faucet, will it be water or will you be gassed in this Nazi death camp? Even if you manage to keep your clothes dry, it won't make any difference. All the moisture is trapped and as you struggle to dry yourself (with a camp towel the size of a kleenex), you sweat so profusely that your camp towel becomes soaked...so you need to take another shower...it's a vicious, never-ending cycle.

It's really hot.

Before he left, John told his colleagues, "Just follow the hottest part of the US, that will be our group." It was supposed to be a joke....