We're not in Kansas anymore.

It's kind of a hackneyed title, but I'm really tired and I couldn't think of anything else. Today we left Kansas, made a brief detour down into Nebraska, and ended up in the high desert of Colorado. So much time has passed since my last entry that I won't even try to cover everything; instead I'll go over roughly the past week. My bike computer stopped working a few days ago and I couldn't figure out why, until I noticed today that the wire going around my brake cable was really loose. Upon closer examination, I found that the cable had snapped in two. At least now I know what's wrong with it (it's pretty much trashed) and also what that rubber-on-metal sound that plagued me up until a few days ago was.

We had heard from reading last year's CUS journal entries that St. Francis, KS has an awesome thrift store, but when we got there mid-afternoon yesterday, we found to our dismay that it was closed. It seems that St. Francis isn't its normal bustling metropolis self on Saturdays, since that's when everyone goes to the WalMart in Goodland. So we bummed around the main drag a little bit, Kristen and I grabbed a beer, and we went back to the church, where I promptly fell asleep on a nicely padded pew. I have never had quite so delightful a wake-up call as the one that came when Rosanna came to tell me that people were going to the thrift store because it was operated by the church, and they were opening it especially for us. We went and it was amazing, its amazingness only augmented by the fact that everything was half off, which made everything 100% amazing-er. I bought plaid shorts, rainbow suspenders and a pair of cowboy boots for $3. Three dollars. Anywhere else, the boots alone would have been at least $20. See, the American midwest totally lacks a hipster population, which keeps the price of vintage clothing nicely low. You could make a killing by driving through, buying up everything, and reselling it in some skinny-jeans-and-sideswept-bangs mecca like San Francisco or Philadelphia.

Oh yeah, we also had a day off in Manhattan, KS last week. Our karaoke experience didn't quite live up to the sheer awesomeness of Bloomington. There was this, er, mentally handicapped guy who wouldn't get off the stage and ran around high-fiving people and singing along to every song, which was mildly amusing until you realized you weren't in a film by David Lynch, at which point it just made you feel dirty. We did, however, find a pretty good coffee shop on our day off in which to talk and wait out the thundershower.

So... yeah. Today was long. Tomorrow will also be long. Then we start climbing... my legs already hurt just thinking about it.