Day 10, Tuesday, September 17

Trees really do grow sideways here it's so windy, and I thought John had just been pulling my leg. Fortunately we had a tailwind or it would have been an entirely different day.

Today couldn't have been easier. We rode about 122 miles with 1500' of climbing and a twenty- to thirty-mile-per-hour tail wind. I knew all day how lucky I was to have the tail wind but I didn't realize quite how lucky until we spent a few miles at the end of the day heading directly into the wind. It was a real workout. I almost felt like getting off my bike and walking it was so much work, and I was even drafting Charles and Troy at the time. If either us or the wind had been heading in a slightly different direction for most of the day it would have been a completely different ride. Everyone was talking at dinner about how The Weather Channel says we should have more of the same tomorrow. I hope so, because a head wind of that force is hard to think about.

The landscape today didn't change much from the last two days: flat land with grass and telephone poles by the side of the road. Not unpleasant, though. There was one point when we came over a bit of a crest and could see the land stretching into a blue horizon in the distance. It was like heading into an ocean almost it was so open and blue.

Did I mention that the winds were unbelievably strong today?

Tonight we're staying at the Big Texan in Amarillo. We started seeing signs for it yesterday. It has a restaurant as well as a hotel and diners who can eat a 72-ounce steak with all the side dishes and dessert in sixty minutes get everything for free. We got a copy of a magazine article about the restaurant in our rider packet, so I guess it's a big deal. There's a giant plastic cow out front and lots of taxidermied animals inside. All of the staff dress in spurs and cowboy boots and say "ya'all" every other word, but Randy from Oklahoma assured me that the "ya'all" part is really how people talk here and is not part of the costume. At 7:00 a band started playing and one of the waiters fired his cap gun repeatedly to mark the event.

The Big Texan

I had a steak at dinner, which tasted really good. I ordered a five-ouncer. It looked really funny when it showed up at the table because it was so small, but it ended up being a good amount of food for me. Even the "ladies" steak order was eight ounces; in order to get a five-ounce steak I had to order a steak sandwich without the bun. I also had a chocolate milkshake that helped fill me up.

Motorcycles shipped all the way from Finland

In addition to our cycling group, at the restaurant there was a large senior citizens bus touring group as well as a motorcycle touring group from Finland. I'm not making that up. Apparently they had all of their bikes shipped here from Finland by cargo boat, which took four weeks, and are spending three and a half weeks touring Route 66, which is about how long it would take us to cycle it. I'm assuming that they get to do more sight seeing along the way, though.

We'll have one more hopefully easy day tomorrow -- as long as the tail wind holds -- then two long days in a row followed by a steep day. We lost another hour today getting into Texas so my evening was a little short, but I'm hoping that with three days of rest and riding below 4,000' altitude, I'll feel reasonably strong on the hard days coming up.