I left Storm Lake this morning in a dense fog. This is the weather I’m talking about; not my state of mind.

In the five months we’ve been on the road, this is the first time I’ve started a ride in fog like this. It was so thick, it was disorienting. I struggled to find the usual landmarks that would tell me whether I was going uphill or downhill, left or right. Strange, but all the roads felt they were slightly downhill. Fortunately, the traffic was very light, but I still turned on the battery-powered taillight that’s been on my bike unused since riding on the busy roads of the eastern states.

After I got five miles or so away from Storm Lake, the fog was clearing off and I started feeling the gentle push of a tailwind. Nice! I haven’t had a day of really good tailwinds in a very long time — maybe not since I was headed north along the east coast.

About mid-morning, I saw this sculpture along the road. I think the road I was one (county road C60) must have been part of the RAGBRAI route for at least one year. I stopped to take some pictures. While I was trying to figure out how to get myself in the picture with the statue, I heard the distinctive sound of a car in reverse. I looked around and someone from the car yelled “Good morning!” I returned the greeting and tried to read the magnetic sign on the side of the car so I could have a better idea of who this person was.

“Are you trying to take a picture?” came from the car next.

I confessed that I was. The sign read “State of Iowa” and nothing more.

She offered to take a picture for me. I told her only in Iowa would someone be so generous as to slow from highway speeds, back up, and offer to take a picture for someone. It seemed to the right thing to say and I really think it might be true. In the thirty-eight states I’ve cycled through, I thought I had seen everything, but this was a first-time experience for me.

She snapped a couple of really nice photos for me. She told me this route was on the RAGBRAI occasionally and that she and her husband ride one day of it every year on their tandem. I thanked her for taking pictures for me and explained to her why a person from Salt Lake City was out riding across Iowa on a foggy day. I gave her a business card, thanked her again, and she went on her way.

By lunchtime, the fog was gone and the sun was coming out. It was starting to look like a very nice day for riding. I was approaching Sioux City and only had ten miles or so to go to the KOA that Pat had located for us to stay at tonight. The KOA was actually in North Sioux City, South Dakota. We had expected to get Nebraska as our thirty-ninth state, but staying at the KOA means that our thirty-ninth state is actually South Dakota.

Here’s a bit of U.S. History: North Dakota and South Dakota were both admitted to statehood on the same date — Nov. 2, 1889. They were the thirty-ninth and fortieth states admitted to statehood. Which was thirty-ninth and which was fortieth? According to the North Dakota government web site, President Benjamin Harrison went to great lengths to obscure the order in which the statehood proclamations were signed. So the exact order is unknown. North Dakota claims it is the thirty-ninth, but it just as easily could have been South Dakota.

Now a bit of Dream Tour trivia: I checked our record of states visited so far and there are no states for which the order of their entry into statehood is the same as the order that we visited it on The Dream Tour. Unless, of course, you’re willing to consider South Dakota as the thirty-ninth state entered into statehood. But that’s the only one among the states we have visited and it doesn’t look like there will be any matches among the nine states we have yet to visit.

I was about five miles from the KOA and I noticed a bank of very dark clouds forming to the west. The wind — at my back all day — suddenly was in my face and very gusty. I picked up the pace, hoping to make the last five miles before the weather got anymore “interesting”. A particularly strong gust of wind came up and suddenly the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees. Shortly after that, I started feeling raindrops. The wind was strong enough now that I was concerned about either hail or a tornado … or both. I called Pat to tell her to keep an eye on the weather, but she was already doing that, of course. She said it was raining very hard where she was. I looked at my GPS and it said I had only 2.8 miles to go to the KOA — it would be raining very hard here very shortly.

By the time my GPS said 1.7 miles to go, I was soaking wet and the wind was blowing very hard. I decided it was probably unsafe to continue so I sought shelter under the eave of a service station. I called Pat again to tell her I was OK and that I would continue when the rain let up. Twenty minutes or so later, it did let up enough for me to safely continue. I crossed over a bridge and saw the “Welcome to South Dakota” sign. I took a picture and then rode the remaining mile to the KOA.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 8:09 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.