My plan yesterday was to drive and meet a string of RAAM riders near the Missouri border and plead with them to turn around and race back through Kansas one more time. I just couldn’t stand the thought of them moving on and leaving me here behind. After spending the bulk of the last 3 days finding and cheering on the riders, what was I to do with myself once they were gone? How would I fill that void? Well a string of events yesterday morning on my drive out to meet them led to me missing most of them so I abandoned that plan. I guess I had to let go sooner or later. What to do now while I was in Eastern Kansas? Luckily I had the for-site to bring a bike with me. I was in the town of Chanute so I unloaded the bike and rode around the town and on a nice but short (very short) paved path they have on the former KATY railroad. As exciting and caught up as I am in this epic, fast paced 3000+ mile Race Across America, I was glad to find that I still enjoyed slowly peddling around a few measly miles on my old cruiser bike.
After leaving Chanute I went to check out the recently finished Southwind trail. I’ll post about that later.
As short as the trail is there are several neat things to see on it and in and around the historic town. Turns out the town’s namesake was quite an interesting individual and a aviation pioneer. While in town I stopped at Benchwarmers for a beer and a snack. A few photos from along the (short) path…
Last night we did go find and cheer on the final solo RAAM rider who was near by and we were just as excited and in awe seeing her as we were the first place rider when he came through Saturday. I don’t know if I’ll go root for any of the RAAM teams still passing through Kansas or not.
Out of approximately 35 solo RAAM riders that made it to Kansas I believe we seen 26 and were able to make contact either verbally or by some sort of gesture with most of them. Pretty cool!