We woke pretty normally. Scott and Geoff made us chocolate chip pancakes by chopping up a block of Hershey's.

We got on the road as usual. Well it was a little different. It was a border race today. Syracuse is only 16 miles from the Kansas-Colorado border. Kansas had been a hard few days so people were excited to get out. It had been the smelliest and frankly most dangerous days of the trip. I tried to remind people that the situation was unlikely to change just because we had crossed an arbitrary border but they wanted to remain blissfully ignorant. Turns out I was wrong. The shoulders were huge today and I don't think I saw a single cattle truck.

The border race wasn't really a race until the last mile or two. I tried to sprint out and front and start the race but no one would come with me - or they would just draft off me. I need to learn how to race. In the end Dane won. Abby beat me....

I know this isn't a race. But on race day it is. The one person I wasn't going to let beat me was Abby. She flew by me with 20 meters to go. I was destroyed....But congrats to her.

The rest of the ride was pretty normal. I was first to the 40 mile rest stop. I think everyone took it easy today because they were annihilated by yesterday.

It was 86 miles today from Syracuse, KS to Las Animas, CO.

We're currently being distributed between parish members. The church is our headquarters for tonight but we're sleeping at host families' houses.

It hailed a minute ago - Kat got nailed on the head by a marble sized piece as she was going to her hosts car. It's the second time today I've seen her injure her head today. The first was standing up in the trailer.

::::::::UPDATE:::::::::

So since I last posted on this blog I've met my host and eaten at the church. My hosts, The Baublits, are awesome. We have beds, food AND INTERNET. Yeah...we lucked out. I'm staying with Evan and Pete here at their house. I'm pretty tired -I'll probably fall asleep after posting this. Bill Baublits was beekeeper for many years. Apparently bee keeping is a big industry here in Las Animas.I've learned TONS about bees and bee keeping. It's really fascinating. I was also looking at this wall of old family photos and trying to piece together their family tree. I asked Diane (Baublits) about all the photos, she explained all the lineages and then directed me to her volumes of scrapbooks. I thouroughly read her scrapbook about her father as a young man. He lived in Las Animas in the 1930's. He looked about my age in the photos. I'm not as skilled a writer as I need to be to explain why it was so cool looking at these scrapbooks. This whole experience (particularly today) i.e. being taken in by hosts and sharing our experiences with them and them sharing their experiences with us has been really....neat.

Incidently, Bill was telling us a story about bees and someone named James. I met James' son at dinner at the church completely by accident.

Ok...sleep time. Colorado is great.