Yesterday’s riding itself was fairly uneventful. It was a long day, 92 miles through the Illinois and Iowa countryside. We crossed over the Mississippi, but that was surprisingly uneventful as well. What I want to write about today is to capture some vignettes of living in a small town. We’re staying at the Senior Center in Oxford Junction, Iowa. I don’t know what the population is but I’d be very surprised if it was over 1000. Last night we ate dinner at Shackey’s Place, home of the All-We-Care-To-Serve-You fried chicken, fish and shrimp. It was hilarious because you had to "reorder" the food, and the woman passive aggressively kept us from ordering too much (because of course we were hungry cyclists). Nice lady, though. I said to Tony that there's a time in a man's life when he decides if he really wants to make somebody go back there and fry up another piece of crappy cod, and the answer for me was "no". She told us that they don’t take credit cards anymore because the Visa company said they needed to get online to continue to use their account, and they don’t have a computer so they said “no thanks”. There’s one gas station, no stop lights, and you can see the grain elevator at the end of town no matter where you stand. I’m sitting outside the public library because that’s where they told us we could get wifi. There is nobody here, but the sun is shining off the main intersection in town, highlights glancing off the Oxford Junction City Hall. I do dearly love small towns like this, and I value this trip so much because of the access it gives us to them. If I came here on my own, I would never get much of the town. I wouldn’t meet the mayor or the city council, as I have many times. I wouldn’t know the library wifi code. I wouldn’t have friends to eat at Shackey’s with. I could never live in a place like this; I would go crazy with boredom. But I love, love love to visit and see them.
P.S. In the middle of a 94 mile day, if you stop at McDonalds, don’t get 20 Chicken McNuggets.
