July 20- Leoti to Dighton, Kan.

It says something about this stretch of the trip that when I do the blog, I have to think hard, and sometimes look at the map, to name the towns.

When we left our motel room last evening to walk to dinner, we found ourselves in a ferocious dust storm, precursor to a thunderstorm. We braved the dust for the one block to the restaurant, and as we returned the dust was gone but the wind was still blowing 30-40 mph. Rain did come later on. I'm glad we didn't get caught out on the road in that weather, which we might have if we'd pressed on to Scott City as we considered doing.

Today's route was simple.  Think of a horizontal line. Put Leoti at the left end, Scott City in the middle, and Dighton at the right. That's today's 50 miles. Arrow-straight eastward, on paper. On the road, there is an interesting difference. Every few miles, the road turned very slightly to the left. Since I had plenty of time to think about it, I figured out why. Lines of latitude (we're at 38 degrees 29 minutes North) run east-west, but they are not straight lines. They are circles equally distant from the pole. To stay on the circle as you travel east, you need to gradually turn left to stay at the same latitude. The difference doesn't show on the map because it uses mercator projection. The straight line from Leoti to Dighton would be a great circle, starting slightly north of east and ending slightly south of east. That's the kind of thing you can think about when you have several hours to ride on a "straight" road.

The riding conditions today were nearly perfect: a smooth road, nearly flat, only a slight wind (headwind), and clouds to temper the effect of heat in the mid-90's. Today we met two pairs of cyclists heading west, two brothers from Texas hurrying to reach Oregon before September medical school interviews, and a pair of young women. We didn't tarry with either pair long because of something I haven't mentioned before: the swarms of biting black flies. We've had them along with us since Pueblo. The women we met today said they've had the biting flies in every state since Virginia.

At our mid-ride rest stop, the thriving little town of Scott City, one couple who saw us at the convenience store chased us down in their car to take our picture and ask our age. Many of the people we've met all along want to know how old we are, and I'll admit we haven't met other cyclists our age. Hell, our generation, either.

Late in today's ride we saw a deer, the first wildlife in several days other than biting flies. She bounded across the road ahead of us and ran across a wide wheat field to the shelter of a cornfield.

We're now in an area of fields of various grains, not thriving but surviving. There are occasional oil wells, and we saw one drilling rig at work on a new well. We also saw a small wind farm, the first since Oregon.

Dighton, about pop. 1000, is another sad case of rural decline. Almost everything is closed today, Saturday, but about 80% of the businesses buildings look dead. Nevertheless, we found shelter in a 1912-vintage hotel and there is food at the Frosty-Creme and the bowling alley, so no complaints. Dighton also has a church, which we'll attend in the morning before hitting the road.