day 43

we left jason and kalene's house and headed to the bike shop to get evan's bottom bracket checked out. we both decided it was time to replace our back tires since they were almost smooth; so we each bought new schwalbe tires. it took awhile to put them on the bikes since they are new. we finally took off, so kind of a late start for us. we headed towards newton, where we grabbed some sonic half priced drinks and some lunch. riding has been pretty much the same still with headwinds. we took off from there and rode a ways till we got to cassoday. i arrived there first and evan was shortly behind and it was around 8ish. i looked over to my left and there was a park and it looked like a tent city! bikers were everywhere and a swarm of them started walking over and then a handful were riding my way. evan then pulled up and we were both shocked at how many there were. we started talking to some of them and there was a group of 25 supported (followed by a van) and they are raising money for MS. most of them are from illinois and were really nice guys and then there was another group there then some unsupported guys tagging along with the giant MS group. one black guy came up to us and was just going nuts over our bikes and anything we'd say, it was super funny. they were all going west bound and we seem to be one of the few going east bound. the group on bikes headed to the only store/gas station to grab some food so we joined them. we enjoyed roast beef sandwiches, chips, and cookies for dinner. we chatted with the guys there for a bit then decided we still needed to try and get to rosalia to help us with our next days' mileage. so it was about 10pm and was dark but we still had 17 miles to go. i am not a huge fan of biking at night because it is very dangerous even though we have front and rear lights but they aren't that powerful. luckily the road was vacant, i think we saw 1 car the whole time we were on it. it was a pretty amazing ride for several reasons, mainly since it was pitch black out we couldn't see anything except some sillhoutes but there were tons and tons of fireflies guiding us to rosalia. it was quite the spectacle; we were flying down the road and we were so tired that i didn't even think of taking a picture of this experience. sorry. we finally arrived in rosalia where we heard there was a church that was open where bikers could take showers but the only church in town was already locked up since it was past 11pm. we looked around for a city park but there wasn't one since it was such a small town so we decided to stealth camp behind the church. we awoke the next morning noticing our stealth camping wasn't so stealthy. we also read the map and saw that the road we took at night to rosalia was in poor conidition needing work so be careful; we had no problems. amazing.