Sunday June 29: Fell off near Bovey Tracey. The pump caught in my trouser leg.

Sunday began with a 1.5 mile stretch of gravel road. Uh oh. Gravel and I are not friends. Take it slow and steady. OK ... until the downhill with the large gravel piled across the entire road. My back wheel spun out to the left, and I tucked and rolled onto my right thigh, hip, and shoulder.

Wipeout!

It hurt. Yowie, did it hurt. But I didn't break or sprain anything, either on myself or on my bike. I have some spectacular scratches and bruises, as you can infer from my right leg and left index finger here:

I lost a day of riding on Sunday, but I'm fine. It's really too bad, because the weather was glorious and the route between Nebraska City, Nebraska and White Cloud, Kansas was spectacular. Rolling hills, huge fields of corn swaying gently in the wind, bright blue sky. The guys had a great day of riding; Al in particular was ecstatic.

Interestingly, when we got to White Cloud, where we were planning to camp, we found the marina "campground" a foot deep in mud from flooding three weeks ago:

So we drove on to Atchison, Kansas, and got a hotel. I love Atchison! More on Atchison in a separate post, but it has a great rail history and we puttered around next to the old Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad depot for some time:

Among other things, this trip is an exercise in adaptation, and again I feel like I'm channeling Lewis & Clark: you don't undertake as enormous an enterprise as theirs without realizing that you will have to adapt to dynamic and changing conditions. Today threw a lot of things at me that required adaptation (nothing on the scale of the Corps of Discovery, but still, the simile strikes me as apt).

Extra points if you can identify the quote in my title: it's from Episode 34 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Harold Pither's cycling tour of Cornwall ("September 2nd. Did not fall off outside Iddesley.").