The previous few days have been hot, humid, and windy. Today was a welcome change from that. The temperatures barely made it into the 70’s (instead of highs of 104 degrees), there was a gentle tailwind for most of the day, and the humidity was definitely low. I knew it was low because at the end of the day when it started to rain, the wetter I got, the colder I got. Riding in rainstorms back east where the humidity was high, for example, you could be riding soaking wet from the rain and still be very comfortable.

Another noteworthy thing from today’s ride is the traffic. Or, more precisely, the lack of it. This is not an area of the country that many people visit and not many people live in this area. Nebraska is not a highly populated state to begin with — according to 2000 U.S. census data, only 1.1 million people live in the entire state. And Cherry county, the county I spent most of the day riding through, with a total population of 6144 people, is one of the least least densely populated counties in the state. It’s population density is a whopping 1 person per square mile. Only Aurthur, Blaine, and McPherson counties (all to the south of Cherry county) are less densely populated. In fact, these are some of the least densely populated areas in the entire country!

Along with fewer trees, fewer people, and less traffic, the terrain is definitely getting hillier. I climbed a total of 2287 feet on today’s ride. By comparison, the previous three days included 996, 1242, and 756 feet of climbing.

Gorden, Nebraska, the town where we’re staying tonight, is a pretty small town. Only about 1600 people live here, but that makes it a huge town compared with others we passed through today. For example, Nenzel, Nebraska, has a population of 13 people.

Gordon is the birthplace of Val Fitch. Val Fitch was one of the physicists that worked on the Manhattan Project. He subsequently did groundbreaking work in physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Princeton University. In fact, he earned the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons. Don’t ask me what that means — I just lifted it from the press release on his Nobel Prize award.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 7:12 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.