Bicycling-wise, yesterday was another rest day, but I spent about 3 and a half hours at a health screening event at Walmart #1 in Rogers, Arkansas, saying hi to people and telling them about The Dream Tour. I set up my laptop to show a slideshow of some of my favorite photos from the tour so far.

After that was over, the plan was for Pat and me to drive down to where I finished my ride the previous day (Ozark, Arkansas) and I could get a small ride in that afternoon. What really happened was we drove back down to Ozark, Arkansas and located a hotel so we could spend the night. I was pretty tiired. Half a day at an event like that tired me out more than a day on the bicycle!

I was so tired, in fact, that I could feel a sore throat coming on. For me, a couple days of a sore throat is the first phase of a cold. I rarely get colds but a couple stressful events in Bentonville and shaking hands with a lot of new people left me vulnerable, I guess.

I’m glad I didn’t have the sore throat during the Bentonville events, but it’s still pretty inconvenient. Today, we woke up to pouring rain that lasted through my preparations for today’s ride. I can handle a sore throat. I can handle riding all day in the rain. Both together was not making me a very happy person.

About 10 AM, as I was getting ready to leave, the rain was about stopped. The sky still looked like it could start raining at any moment and there was a stiff east wind that I knew I would be fighting all day.

It stayed dry all the way to Magazine, Arkansas (about 35 miles). It was some great Arkansas countryside too. The traffic was very light, even for a Saturday morning, so I could hear the wildlife as I cycled through the rolling hills. I’m not very good at identifying birds, so I can’t tell you what kinds of birds I heard. What I can tell you is there was a lot of singing going on in those Arkansas forests! Besides the birds, the recent rain had filled up some of the roadside ditches and brought out the bullfrogs because I could hear them croaking as I went by. I saw a lot of cattle too, including the curious two you see in the photo to the right. I took a ten minute break along side the road and I don’t think they took their eyes off me the whole time.

About 40 miles into the ride, the rain started. I had started the ride in my raingear and up to this point, I was regretting it because it wasn’t doing anything for me except flapping in the wind and making me overheat. Now the raingear was coming in handy.

When I arrived in Danville, our destination for the day, I was still comfortably warm even though I was pretty much soaking wet. Good cycling raingear is great that way — it allows you to regulate your temperature to stay warm even if you are soaking wet. Pat tells me that there’s definitely no place to stay in Danville. A quick look at the map showed that the closest lodging was either in Dardanelle (20 miles north out of our way) or Hot Springs Village (on our route, but 48 miles further). With the sore throat, I didn’t think it would be wise to ride anymore, so we decided to drive to Dardanelle for the night and then come back here in the morning and pick up where I left off. Hopefully, the weather will have improved by then.

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