Days 52-54: Catch-up of the last few days in "Emergency Calls Only" territory.

Sorry for dropping off the face of the planet again, family and friends. Kansas was the Land of Cell Service (nothing to block the signal... at all) but Utah is apparently not so cell phone-friendly. I usually try to keep posts relatively short to limit the bore factor, but I've got a little more ground to cover on this one.

Miles (all cities are in Utah... yup, we're still there.)
Day 52: Bryce Canyon to nowhere, 40 miles (ugh)
Day 53: nowhere to Cedar City, 45 miles (ugh)
Day 54: Cedar City to Milford, 55 miles (double ugh)
But, thinking more positively: total miles, 3420.

As you can tell by the mileages, lots of unfortunate events have been keeping us from getting the miles done the past few days. Flat tires, steep grades, weather, and time were not our friends this week.

Rode through a town called Panguitch the other day. We were looking forward to that one for a while. Lou and I confessed to each other that we think "Penguin Sandwich" every time the name is mentioned, which I enjoy a lot more than is probably called for, and is almost definitely not as funny to you as it is to us. Had a guy in a truck slow down to offer us a place to stay in town, but we wanted to get a few more miles done for the day. Headed down the road to a campground called White Bridge that you did in fact have to travel over a tiny white bridge to get to. That U.S. Forest Service is pretty creative with the names.

Yesterday started with a long climb after which we dropped off the Colorado Plateau right into Cedar City. That descent was the most fun of all of the long ones we've had; I'm thinking it had to do with the absence of ridiculous headwinds and the ensuing storms that we had during every one in the Rockies. 17 uninterrupted miles of downhill was nice, to say the least. Cedar City is only one of two towns on this whole map (covering 465 miles) that has a bike shop, so I needed to get a new tube while I had the chance. We were disappointed to see that the shop was closed, but as we turned to leave a man opened the door and asked what we needed. When we told him, he solemnly motioned for us to follow and turned back into the store. He set us up with the tube and advised us that camping in the city park would be no problem. We rode over to it and saw a sign indicating that, unlike a lot of city parks we've been through, you're actually not allowed to camp there, but we found a dark corner and it was warm enough not to even set up the tent. Sneaked out this morning before it got light enough to see us, pleased with our stealth camping success.

Today started out looking promising: we got on the road early and even with having to stop to fix Lou's flat rear tire, strong tailwinds got us 40 miles before lunch. A few miles in, a car pulled over to the shoulder and the driver got out. As we passed by he asked us if we needed a place to stay in Milford, which was 55 miles from our starting point that morning. It was really nice to receive such an offer twice in three days, but again we wanted to get as many miles done today as possible (and with such a great tailwind, what was to stop us from being carried 100 or so today?), so we thanked him but had to decline the offer. We were planning on filling up water in Milford, the last town before an 84-mile stretch with no towns or services and camping somewhere along the road again... until we saw the dust storm. That's right, people, a new weather feature decided to make an appearance. It was actually kind of exciting at first, with thick dust making it impossible to see through to the other side and wind blowing the grass and small bushes crazily. We put bandannas over our faces to keep from breathing the dust and kept riding, but as we approached Milford, the road turned West and the crosswind was so strong we had to get off our bikes and walk until the road turned back North. It became pretty apparent that we had to stop when a trucker told us the wind in the next valley we were heading to was worse, and the woman in the post office told us it was supposed to keep up until 3am. During the "should we go on?" conversation, we miraculously ran into Eddie, the guy who'd stopped to offer us a place to stay earlier today. His father owns a house in town that he rents out, but it's vacant at the moment, and Eddie generously offered to let us stay there for the night.

Not happy to be covering so few miles today, but at least we got some in before the storm got bad, and we're way lucky to be meeting such nice people in Utah. They say that Kansas has the nicest people, but I'm pretty sure I've met a higher ratio of nice people to mean people here. Pretty much 100% nice, which is... nice.