sweating it out in nebraska

dateline: broken bow, nebraska
it is humid at 8:00 in the morning...looks alot like ohio/midwest already because of it. slow moving day, i did some big mileage yesterday trying to make up for prior weather hampering. nebraska is big and rolling, very beautiful and gentle. the people have been great, stopping and offering water in the heat of the day. sparsely populated and quite often the towns i go through are totally shut down...so i had to carry extra water and food, some unplanned weight. but the views extend on forever it seems, sandy dunes covered in grass...with the wind slipping by. no ipod, just the sounds of the wind in the grass and i cannot figure out the insect, but they make alot of noise. maybe a car every 20 minutes or so, and all the trains blow their horns when they see me (more trains than cars).
mileage log as follows:
72 miles torrington, wy to alliance nebraska...construction forced me to hitch a ride for 10 miles or so, rocks were being kicked up and the surface was unstable. so i hitched a ride with a couple to finish the day off. hot and rolling in the 100's...
75 miles to hyanis, ne...long stretched out rolling hills. i think i saw canada when i looked to the north. but the lightning was incredible...9:00 am in the morning and it was coming straight down out of this lonely cloud. i was the tallest object as far as i could see, so i hung out in a small post office and talked with jody the post master for a while. that 75 miles took ten hours because of isolated storms and headwinds...riding and waiting. in hyanis i took cover in a hotel room while this massive storm rolled by to the south of us, never seen clouds or lightning like it. again realizing that it is the scale of things here, bigger.
135 miles to broken bow, a very beautiful small town in the center of nebraska...hot and humid and lots of motorcyclists coming home from sturgis, which makes for interesting conversation at all my stops. it is starting to get more populated, which is a good thing. at one point yesterday i had to go 41 miles without water/food/stop and probably saw a car on average every half hour...but the rhythm of the rolling hills is serene and almost hypnotic on the bike. maybe it is just finally getting into the rhythm of being on the bike, which is becoming more comfortable than being off the bike...
so the landscape is changing, slowly at the pace of the bike... more palatable than the pace my life has been going the past couple of years. has been good clearing the mind...just being on the bike. i kind of giggle when i remember the last time i went on a trip like this to france, and came back and moved two weeks later (to carbondale) ...find myself wondering what change this trip will bring to my life....hmmm. time to start rolling. b