We woke up nice and early and packed up our camp spot. It was good that we were under the pavilion last night because it rained off and on for a while, this time we were dry under our pavilion though! We rode across the street to the store to get another 1/2 gallon of milk because we had extra cereal left in our 2lb bag from lunch yesterday. It was a little chilly in the morning, but it didn't take long to warm up again. Thank goodness we waited a day because we were flying down the road heading towards CO; the wind was pushing us right along for the first 46 miles of our ride today. Since we were only about 17 miles from the border when we were in Kimball, it didn't take us too long to arrive in CO. We took our traditional picture by the sign and then continued on. When we came to the T intersection where we were to turn west again, there was an itty bitty little town where we stopped to make lunch. There were two churches, a post office, dirt roads through the town and a handful of houses. There was a garage and a cafe that was closed that we decided to stop at because there were a couple people outside. I asked the man there if there was a bathroom anywhere around, since we hadn't seen one in 46 miles, and he let me use the one in the old cafe that he owned. We chit chatted with him for a little before we made Ramen noodles for lunch. It turns out that he had been to Buffalo numerous times and that when he was in the service back in the 60s, he helped to build part of the Al-Can highway (Alaskan Highway). When it was time to get back on the road the wind was at our sides, but didn't slow us down too much since we were able to keep normal touring speed. There were a few times when the wind would get really strong for a couple minutes, but then it would return to normal. For the last 15 miles of our ride it rained off and on and was really cold. Eventually we made it to the small town of Briggsdale. We knew there was a park to camp in because we had looked at the area while at the library yesterdaady, but we took a quick ride around town anyway. There were two paved roads and the rest, even the main street, were dirt. Still the town was bigger than the one we stopped at to make lunch. When we rode into the National Grassland Park, we found a really nice shelter to camp under, which was great because it was still raining and had started to thunder. This shelter had 3 walls, a roof, lights and a place to make a fire in the middle (oh and more outlets to plug things into that we knew what to do with!). It was great to be out of the wind and the rain. We put up our tent and then made some rice with cream of mushroom soup and tuna for dinner. We made a fire in the fire pit to warm the shelter area up and snacked on our cookies and crackers with peanut butter. We played a game of cards with the cards the Sisters in Mitchell, SD gave us and talked with family for a bit. Tomorrow we are going to a Warm Showers host in Fort Collins, which is only about 40 miles away, so we will have a lighter day tomorrow. We had a great day today and are glad we waited so we didn't have to ride in that strong head wind. It took us 7 hours to ride 83.70 miles today.
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