After cutting the previous day short, it made sense to get somewhere past Glendo State Park. The goal was now Guernsey State Park, about 30 miles past Glendo. There was still one monster hill in the way. The headwind was still devastating.

By some miracle, the climb didn't feel that bad, even though on paper, it was. Maybe coming off the heels of a short day made it a little easier. It was good to get this climb done early in the morning, before it got hot.

As the road climbed, it looked like rain ahead. I put on my jacket before it hit. As it turned out, it wasn't rain; it was thick fog. The jacket came back off. I was too lazy to put it away though, so I held it in my hand while riding the last few miles up the hill. I knew I'd want it on the descent down.

Upon reaching the top, I changed my mind about putting on the jacket, and instead simply switched to my long sleeve shirt. That would turn out to be a mistake.

There's something magical about a foggy forest. The world feels like a living, breathing thing. And the road was headed back downhill. I was enjoying the hell out of the ride. At first.

The trees disappeared and the fog got thick enough where you could barely see 10 meters ahead, if that. It still wasn't raining, but racing downhill through the fog, or at least descending as fast as felt safe with poor visibility, caused the fog to stick and coat everything with moisture. Pretty soon, everything was wet, including the unpaved road, which got increasingly soft. The jacket would’ve been a good choice. I was too lazy to stop and pull it out of the bag, and I simply wanted to get down the hill and out of the fog as soon as possible. The tires began flinging wet gravel everywhere. 

Leaving the cover of the trees caused the headwind to unleash its full force. Wind not only slows you down, but also makes obnoxious noise, and in this case, caused even more fog to stick. For some reason, I had the misguided notion that if I continued down the hill, there would be more trees. Of course not. This is Wyoming. There are never any trees.

Not long before Glendo, the fog finally cleared, though. It remained a chilly, cloudy, dreary day. I never bothered putting on sunscreen. The headwind only got stronger. I only got more miserable. I continued on to Guernsey.

Almost all you see in this part of the country are trucks and RVs. I understand driving a truck if you need it for work, and in rural Wyoming, that's probably not atypical. But if not, what are you doing?

Compared to a mid-sized sedan, which seats the same number of people, a pickup truck is roughly double the price, double the size, and has twice as much ownership cost. And for what? How often does anyone use a truck for its intended purpose?

In the United States, an overwhelming 80% of new car sales are pickups and SUVs. Probably less than 10% of them are routinely used for hauling or towing.

It’s been well-documented that pickups aren’t even work vehicles anymore. Where a two-door, four-seat pickup used to be a bougie novelty, that would now be considered primitive. Most pickups have four full-size doors, heated seats, surround sound, a touch screen, WiFi, and all the modern conveniences a suburbanite needs on their way to the grocery store.

To make room for the large, luxurious cab, the bed is half the size it used to be. The bed is the only useful feature a truck has which a car doesn’t. 90% of pickup trucks are status symbols and nothing else. All hat, no cattle.

At first glance, it may look as if SUVs have gone in a different direction, due to the increased popularity of the sub-category “Crossover SUV.” However, the crossover isn’t a new category of smaller SUVs; those have always existed, like the Blazer and the Bronco. Rather, full-size SUVs, like the Excursion and Suburban, have gotten large enough that what used to be normal now appears to be in an entirely different, compact-size category.

While crossover SUVs are more reasonably sized, it’s still simply a car that’s too big. When people buy a full-size SUV, what they’re really in need of is a minivan or a station wagon. In the case of crossover SUVs, what they’re looking for is a hatchback. From experience, they have more cargo room than many realize; you can fit a mountain bike in the back without removing a wheel.

But what if I need to move something big?? I need a truck!!
The one time per year you need to move a couch or a refrigerator, rent a truck! It costs less than $50 per day. You’ll make that difference up in gas money in a matter of weeks, not to mention insurance, maintenance, and saving tens of thousands on the cost of the car itself.

Every so often, a truck easily passes me (because there's no other cars around), and then they roll coal. What's the point? I didn't slow them down; are they trying to show off or what? They're only hurting themselves, as well as the air literally everyone breathes.

There was an exceptional number of RVs around Glendo in particular. I wondered why. Maybe because it was a Saturday, there were more than usual. Maybe RVs are simply popular in this area. Maybe they were all headed to Yellowstone, which tends to dominate the whole state of Wyoming. Maybe they were all headed to one of the state parks nearby. Not sure.

Compared to trucks, I have a lot of similar questions about RVs. A camper trailer is about $20,000, whereas a motorhome can go for $100,000. If staying in an RV park saves $100 per night, compared to the cost of a hotel room, it’ll take anywhere from 200 to 1,000 nights before the RV “pays for itself.” That’s not even considering the thousands of dollars spent on gasoline and maintenance, which may easily make the gap insurmountable. And RVs don’t come with housekeeping service.

Versus a car and a tent, there’s no comparison. RVs are expensive toys for people who want to pretend to camp by avoiding hotel rooms, but are too delicate to stay outside.

Old folks, you get a pass.

Originally, I had planned to camp at Guernsey State Park, but then I noticed it was directly adjacent to train tracks. Whose idea was it to put a campground and train tracks next to each other? I made other plans.

Like many parts of the Pony Express, Guernsey was also a stop on the Oregon Trail. Just outside of town, there's a spot where you can still see where the wagons wore a rut into the sandstone, as much as 1.5 meters deep.

Once out of the mountains, most of the roads are either highways or farm roads. Unsurprisingly, the Pony Express route uses farm roads. However, the official route makes a turn sometimes as frequently as once every mile, often adding up to dozens of turns per day, with the goal of keeping riders on unpaved roads as frequently as possible.

Riding a bike is more enjoyable when you simply get on a road and pedal. Checking your phone every five minutes to make sure you're not doing something wrong is the opposite of fun. And bike touring is supposed to be fun. The official route wasn’t historically accurate either, so it was hard to see the point.

Shortly after leaving Guernsey, it’s only a short side trip to find Register Cliff, a rock feature made of soft sandstone. Like Independence Rock, it was a well-known checkpoint on the Oregon Trail, where emigrants would carve their names into the cliff. Evidently, people are still doing it, because some of the dates were much more recent than others.

Looking at the names themselves is both unremarkable and fascinating. None of these people ever became famous, and here they are, literally etched into history. Perhaps that’s why we romanticize the Wild West. In every other historical period, the important figures were “important” people: kings, generals, presidents, emperors. But for one brief stage in American history, ordinary people were the heroes.

Leaving the mountains means you also leave public land. From here on out, essentially all land would be private, most of it farmland. That means you can't simply pull over and pitch a tent. Instead, you have to get into a town and camp or stay somewhere “official.” In this part of the country, that means a lot of RV parks. An astonishing amount of them are located adjacent to train tracks, which is about the dumbest possible place to put a campground, though it matters less when you’re inside an RV instead of a tent.

In a span of two days, I pulled three goat heads out of my tires. Each time, it sealed almost instantly. Nice! I should’ve put new sealant in the tires before the ride started, but I was glad I had it now.

One night, while sitting on my sleeping bag just before turning in, there was a loud POP! from the foot end of the tent. I looked down. The internal baffles had failed, which meant part of the pad was no longer shaped like a surfboard and more like a hot dog. While sleeping, my feet had to pick a side to slide off.

In the meantime, the zipper on the frame bag had failed. I left the slider in the center of the zipper, so it at least had two small openings instead of one big one.

Multiple gear was failing or barely working, but I only had to make it another week.

During the school year, I print a new mantra each week and tape it to my classroom door. Things like “Do, and then you will understand,” or “Everyone makes an effort when it ‘matters’.” One day, I started thinking about them. What do I want my students to know? To think? Is there a way I can change how they approach a problem, whether we're talking about physics or life in general?

Almost every student has asked, “When are we ever gonna use this?” The correct answer is most of us won’t. But that’s not the point. As much as I would like to believe my students will become physicists and engineers and actually use the things we learn in class, the reality is for 90% of them, that's not the case. More importantly, we can teach them how to use the information they have, as well as their brain, to solve a problem.

Football players don’t score points during the game by lifting weights. So why do they lift weights? Obviously, the correct answer is to make themselves stronger. Learning the quadratic formula and using it to solve the trajectory of a projectile is the mental equivalent of doing deadlifts and wind sprints. We’re making your mind stronger. That’ll be useful for the rest of your life.

Among my students, it’s well-known I’m a fan of Carl Sagan. On his birthday, we usually watch a clip of him reading from one of his books; I especially favor the famed passage often known as “Pale Blue Dot,” taken from the book and referring to the photograph, each of the same name. I overwhelmingly recommend reading or listening; it’s one of the few things which ought to be required reading for the human race.

This past fall, the Pale Blue Dot passage struck a chord with one student in particular, who asked to borrow one of his books. Later in the year, she returned it with at least 40 sticky notes in it, with notes she’d written on them. She wasn’t merely looking at the words, she was actively reading it.

At the end of the year, I got a card from the same student, thanking me for being her Physics teacher and for loaning her the Sagan book. It went on to describe how it changed the way she thought, not only about science, but also about life, and she wished more classes were as thought-provoking and intellectually valuable. I looked again at the front cover, which at first glance, had appeared to be plain black. It was the Pale Blue Dot image, which she’d printed herself and made into a card.

Sometimes you look around and it feels like half the population is exceedingly vapid. It would be a better world if more people, especially young people, were as thoughtful, engaged, and had a certain cognitive gumption. Students like her give me hope.

I'd been thinking of starting a marathon club at my high school in the fall, and these mantras are part of that. Many of the things I try to “really” teach students in Physics are also things which could be taught through distance running. Things like practicing every day, expecting slow improvement, and building yourself into something greater, through persistence and patience.

The biggest problem is I don't know how to sell or pitch anything. I'm bad at convincing people to do something they don't already want to do. It seems as if there's interest in a marathon club, but is there really? A lot of teenagers will say they're going to do something, but then they don't follow through. Still others simply never do much at all.

But I’m gonna give it the ol’ college try. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about going into this school year, and it has potential to turn into something big. I’m excited about ordering team jerseys, holding group training runs, and of course, seeing the students run their first marathon, and doing it as a team. There are lots of science teachers, but how many high schools have a marathon team? This could be my legacy.

Almost immediately upon entering Nebraska, I started seeing prairie dogs. A lot of them. I like the way they scamper around from hole to hole. And my goodness, there are a lot of holes. There's a little mound around them, so they're plainly visible. It may seem strange, but it might be the coolest animal seen on the whole ride.

The ride got noticeably flatter, less open, more populated, and hot. On the first full day in Nebraska, The temperature reached 90 °F (32 °C) for the first time. The following day, 98 °F (37 °C).

At camp one night, I noticed a bunch of ants getting on to my shoes, and kind of freaked out, but then realized they weren't fire ants. Fire ants don't even exist up here. Immediately, I no longer cared about the ants. But that made me wonder:
Why does anyone care about ants? There must be hundreds of books, movies, and other stories which mention ants ruining a picnic, or getting into a house. However, essentially all media comes from places which don't have fire ants. If they don't bite, who cares?? How can they ruin anything when they're benign?

The wind in Western Nebraska is essentially just as strong as in Wyoming, and for 4 days in a row, I had to fight it. I was frustrated and exhausted, ready to get the ride over with. Thanks to frequent headwind and increased humidity, I switched to wearing my short-sleeve running shirt while riding, rather than the long-sleeve fishing shirt I’d been using.

In a town named Chappell, camping was allowed at the lake park, which was situated about a half-mile from the train tracks and a quarter-mile from the interstate. I considered stealth camping in the city park instead, on the opposite end of town, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to get in trouble, and the lake park had a bathroom with running water and an outlet. The train came by infrequently, only about once every few hours, and wasn’t so terribly loud. The interstate was considerably noisier, but I convinced myself the traffic would calm down at night and would probably fade into white noise.

Neither of those things happened. Evidently this interstate is an important shipping corridor, because 18-wheelers were a constant presence at all hours. I only got restless sleep at best.

It was just about at 3:00 AM, right when I might’ve been tired enough to fall asleep no matter how noisy it was, when a young woman came running along the lake, screaming.
“CALL THE COPS!! CALL THE COPS!!”

If there’s a legit reason to call the cops, I want to know what it is, for my own sake. I poked my head out of my tent.
“What’s going on?”
“CALL THE COPS!! NOW!! JUST CALL THEM!!”
“I will; will you tell me what’s going on?”
“CALL THE COPS!! JUST DO IT!!”

She ran over and crawled into my tent, breaking one of the guy lines in the process.
“HE HIT ME IN THE HEAD WITH A BOTTLE!! HE HIT ME SO HARD!! HE’S COMING!!”

I called 9-1-1 for the first time in my life. I could hear someone walking along the lake, in our general direction, waving a flashlight around. I had to whisper to the operator; whoever this guy was, I didn’t want him to know I had this girl inside my tent.

The girl, whose name I never got, was bleeding from a small wound on her forehead. I handed her my bandana and told her to put pressure on it. She didn’t seem to know what to do and just dabbed at it. She was generally acting erratically; I suspected she was drunk, but may have only been scared.

The cops showed up after about 30 minutes; they almost certainly had to drive in from another town. The girl immediately ran over, telling them her friend was knocked out and she had to go looking for her. She left her shoes in my tent. I approached the cops, told them I was the one that called in, and retired back to my tent. My alarm was set to go off in 1.5 hours.

The cops must have left at some point, because the same cops showed up again as I was packing up in the morning. Evidently some young adults were drinking late at night, an argument started, someone’s keys got thrown in the lake, and then someone hit two people with a beer bottle. The cops weren’t sure where the guy was, but his truck was still there, since the keys were in the lake. He must have taken off on foot once he realized he was in trouble.

After a sleepless night and four straight days of headwind, there was finally a tailwind, and it stayed behind me all day. It wasn't particularly powerful, but highly consistent. Finally, without a disadvantage, I felt like Superman. I cranked out 210 km (130 miles) before 4:00 PM and could’ve kept going.

Gothenburg, NE is home to one of the best-preserved original Pony Express stations, found in a city park in the center of town. Inside is a tiny museum and gift shop.

The good times wouldn't last. The following day, there was a light crosswind in the morning, which didn't have any noticeable effect at all. After logging 100 km (60 miles) by 11:00 AM, the wind decided to change directions and go ballistic.

65 km (40 miles), nearly straight into it. Even in the flat, it took effort to hold a pace of 13 km/h (8 mph). It was coming a bit from the left, about 11 o' clock. On the rare occasion there was a strip of trees on the left side of the road, my speed instantly doubled for as long as the trees lasted, then immediately plummeted back down once they were gone.

Everyone in Nebraska and Wyoming needs to plant a bunch of trees. Out here in farm country, it'd be highly beneficial to the farmers. If there were trees along every road, surrounding every farm, it would break up wind not only directly adjacent to the trees, but sustained winds couldn't keep as much momentum going, and there wouldn't be as much wind in general. As a result, crops would need less water, with the wind unable to dry them out. In addition, trees would provide habitats to birds, which could eat the insects that otherwise eat crops. And who doesn't like trees in general? Let's get this done, people. Let's make the world a better place, one tree at a time.

Name:
I am a carbon-based life form.