I remember the July 4 on my ride across America. July 3 was a rest day, and the last day of a brutal heat wave—the kind of heat where the news has stories about old people dying. Woke up to a steady rain in St. Joseph, MO and rode to Chillicothe, MO. Where I’m from, rain in the summer is still cold enough to kill via hypothermia, so I asked a member of the group who lived in the Midwest, “how do you dress for this weather? Rain jacket? Tights?” “You get wet,” she replied. So, we rode about 100 miles in the steady rain. It only stopped when I got off the bike for lunch, and resumed when I left the café… Once we got to Chillicothe, the rain stopped again and I found out that the local fireworks display would be at the local park. We couldn’t sit on the soaking-wet grass, but is there anything better than a small-town Independence Day parade and fireworks?
We also stopped in Richmond. I seem to recall confusion about what time it was because some parts of Indiana didn’t observe Daylight Saving time and we literally were staying on a boundary between DST and ST, so nobody was clear about what time it was.
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I remember the July 4 on my ride across America. July 3 was a rest day, and the last day of a brutal heat wave—the kind of heat where the news has stories about old people dying. Woke up to a steady rain in St. Joseph, MO and rode to Chillicothe, MO. Where I’m from, rain in the summer is still cold enough to kill via hypothermia, so I asked a member of the group who lived in the Midwest, “how do you dress for this weather? Rain jacket? Tights?” “You get wet,” she replied. So, we rode about 100 miles in the steady rain. It only stopped when I got off the bike for lunch, and resumed when I left the café… Once we got to Chillicothe, the rain stopped again and I found out that the local fireworks display would be at the local park. We couldn’t sit on the soaking-wet grass, but is there anything better than a small-town Independence Day parade and fireworks?
We also stopped in Richmond. I seem to recall confusion about what time it was because some parts of Indiana didn’t observe Daylight Saving time and we literally were staying on a boundary between DST and ST, so nobody was clear about what time it was.