Full Day

Today, Monday, which I've perpetually forgotten to be Memorial Day, has been a good, full day. After waking up under my gazebo this morning, while preparing to head out, two very nice Coloradans visiting family in Gordon brought me a plate of food. They called it a "snack", but it was really more substantive than that ( cantaloupe, grapes, muffin, breads). My faith in the kindness of strangers is continually renewed out here.

I took more pictures today than I can possibly post or probably had any right or reason to take. At my dad's behest, I paid the $5 to see the fur trading museum. It was money well spent. There's a lot of history to that profession, and though most of it is, well, terribly sad (overhunting, terrible treatment of the Native Americans...), it's still interesting, and probably important, to learn about. I probably photo documented the whole damn museum for my dad.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I visited another museum in town. I came to the home of the woman I'm staying with tonight (through a complicated means of a third party couch surfing arrangement), and after an amazing shower and putting my clothes in the washer (oh yes, clean laundry!), she offered to show me the county museum. It's closed right now, but she just happens to have a key, because she just happens to give tours (not to mention have plenty if her own family history in the museum). She drove me out there and showed me all around the museum and I took a ton more pictures.

She's 93 by the way. You'd never guess it. She took me out there, told me lots of interesting history, much of which she'd lived herself, and walked all the grounds of that museum, and only got slightly winded in the process. She told me she hopes to have another decade in her. I hope so too. I've never seen a person her age so alive. She also lives in a gorgeous, historic house that she rents rooms to college kids in. She's really remarkable. I feel privileged not only to have this bed for the night (that's right, guest bed, not couch), but to have gotten to meet its owner.

So hard to choose the right pictures to highlight... I was really reminded that as rough it's been biking miles on miles a day and going a full week without sleeping indoors until tonight, that it was so much harder just to simply live at all 100 years ago. We have it so easy these days. I have it so easy.

I should reach South Dakota tomorrow. I've crossed most of a whole state, diagonally. I don't think it can be said anymore that I haven't seen Nebraska. After these 450ish miles, I have definitely explored my home state. And I'm really excited to be moving on.

This post brought to you by a cell tower somewhere in South Dakota.