USNA 1973 Ride-2-Remember

Day 34, 6 September: O‘Neill to Norfolk, NE

Today’s ride was from O’Neill to Norfolk, Neb, 73 miles – which turned out to be 78 for Bill and me, but more on that later. Today I rode for Raoul Conway, 21^st Co from Charleston, SC. He became a dentist after leaving the Navy. He passed at age 51.

We have been riding the Cowboy Trail – cinder, gravel bike trail – for 435 miles… OK, maybe 200. Not ALL was on the trail because when the gravel and cinder got soft and it was harder to not get bogged down, we would jump onto Rt 20 which paralleled the trail.  Remember my James Bond analogy: “… and how would you like to die, Mr. Bond”?   It was riding in what often felt like riding on the beach, or, for my Farmington, NM homeboys, like riding your bike in the dry riverbed – or facing the *&#@ expansion cracks on the shoulder.  Sometimes I question my life choices. 😒

 While we were dealing with “the life choice of the day”, we didn’t notice the haze over the entire area. Turns out smoke from Canadian fires has drifted our way. Now we just have figure out how to hold our breath for 70 miles tomorrow.  

Tomorrow has some significance because a) we depart Nebraska, b) we cross the Missouri River.  NO I will NOT be swimming across.

Bill and I had a Thelma & Louise moment when our cues told us to make a hard right on the main road.  Well, we were doing a fairly good pace on this section of the trail which also looked more direct to Norfolk – our destination.  Ignoring the repeated admonitions of the Ride With GPS version of Siri, we proceeded… at least until we came to – no trail. It just ended with a 20-foot drop to the Elkhorn River, which was about 200 yards wide.  Fortunately, we were not moving fast enough to do a REAL T&L re-enactment, but that’s the best analogy I could come up with.  That little excursion added about 5 miles to our day.

Ron Bowman