Getting a late start on our journey east from western Montana, we headed down I-90 instead of meandering through the Big Hole as we had thought we might. We had decided to try city park camping, first stop, Columbus, Montana, on the Yellowstone River. We arrived late and found one campsite left, and that only because a group of tent campers decided to combine into one site. In the morning we tried breakfast at McDonalds, the first time we had been in one in several years. Yogurt parfait and coffee was all we dared. Coffee wasn’t bad, yogurt was partly frozen. Hmm.

We set off into new territory, south to Cody, Wyoming, then on to Casper and Douglas, ending at a KOA for the night, parked in the grass in the tent area. The management had set up a dozen or so tents and several portable toilets in anticipation of eclipse traffic. A long walk through the woods to the showers and rest rooms. The next morning, another repeat at McD’s. This time, the coffee was acid but the yogurt was OK. We decided to end that experiment and do our usual grocery/Starbucks foraging in the future.

Cowboy Trail – West Bridges from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Steadily rolling off the high plains to western Nebraska, we checked in at the Wacky West RV Park in Valentine, in 33°C temps and strong winds. We walked to a nearby “health food” store that mostly stocked organic candies plus and got a couple of wraps, then decided to ride the rail trail to the high trestle over the Niobrara River that evening instead of waiting until morning. Just past the campground, the trail turned to gravel, and we ground on into the crosswind (read: an impediment both ways). It was still hot, but a thunderstorm was predicted later and we didn’t want to take a chance on getting caught out on the prairie. And, thunder and heavy rain did come, just at dark.

The next morning, we sped on east on US 20, paralleling the Cowboy Trail, stopping in Long Pine to ride across the Pine Creek trestle, as high as the Niobrara trestle, but not as long, and much closer to town. Then, off to the east end of the trail to camp at a city park in Norfolk, Nebraska.

Cowboy Trail East from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Early morning, we rode the Cowboy Trail up the Elkhorn River 8 km and back, finishing with a spin around the concrete trail through the park and athletic fields before packing up and checking out the local coffees hop downtown. Finally, off to Lincoln and a basement B&B for the eclipse weekend. An overnight thunderstorm knocked out power over most of the city, uprooting trees and leaving streets littered with branches and blocked by fallen trees. After fumbling around our lodging by flashlight, we threaded our way out though the debris-filled streets in search of a laundromat with power, then took a walk around the state capitol complex and scoped out likely viewing spots for the eclipse.

Monday, we checked out and positioned ourselves in a city park with a good view and set up to watch the eclipse. We constructed a viewing contraption with a cardboard box and binoculars, having passed up a chance to buy the paper eclipse glasses when we passed through Oregon at the start of our trip. We moved our truck to make room for another parking spot next to us, and the grateful couple gave us a couple spare glasses, so we didn’t have to fight with the box in the wind during the whole event. It was spectacular, despite the sometimes heavy cloud cover. Judy had seen the total eclipse that passed over the Northwest in 1979, but I had only seen partial eclipses. Our photos did not do it justice.

Immediately after the totality, we got in line to exit the park and find our way out of the city. Headed north, we decided to stay at the city park in Norfolk again, as it was a very nice, quiet camp. After leaving the park, traffic was fairly normal until we got to Columbia, with traffic lights and merging eclipse traffic from Grand Island, which was squarely in the path of longest totality. Arriving in Norfolk, the campground was again lightly used: some of the same campers were still there, and we stayed in the same campsite as before.

Continuing north, we stopped at my cousin Cathy’s house in Worthington, Minnesota to drop off a family heirloom, a mantel clock her father had rebuilt in the 1950s. We then headed back south into Iowa, camping at a state park on Spirit Lake: electricity and flush toilets, but no potable water or showers, and mud in the site we picked. In the morning, we drove to Lake Okoboji, parked near the bike trails, and rode around the lake. Except, a bit more than halfway around, we had a tire failure, followed by a succession of used tubes that wouldn’t hold air. A kind runner, Greg Fox, gave us a lift to the bike shop where we not only got our tire fixed (we had a spare tire, just not any good spare tubes), but a couple of extra tubes and, best of all, got the shifting problems that had plagued us since picking up the supposedly tuned machine in Eugene several weeks before. All of the cables should have been replaced, as they are stretched and have a lot of friction in the housings. The Okoboji shop lubricated the cables and adjusted as best they could, and we finished the ride, about 10 km shorter than we had anticipated.

Wanting to find a camp with showers, we picked a nearby RV park, which was reluctant to accept our nondescript van as a real RV.  They finally put us in the hiker-biker site.  We got our showers and left very early in the morning, having endured the disapproving gaze of the land-yacht crowd as they returned from their days adventures.

So it went. We had finally gotten our bicycle tuned and hopefully most of the major failures behind us. We were beyond the smoke and heat of the Rocky Mountains and High Plains, and had refined our camping and traveling to a comfortable routine, even figuring out an acceptable way to cope with no air conditioning in the car—using the sun visors as baffles to reduce the noise from open windows.

Next:  More Iowa bicycling, working toward Wisconsin.