Today we dedicated our ride to JG Keown, the stepdad of a woman named Liz who we had the honor of conducting a Portrait with. She came to interview us for the local paper, but we thought her story was so powerful and we are thankful that she shared. We also dedicated today to Nathan and Jim. We happened to run in to Nathan and Jim in the Badlands National Park and they shared with us their story of their melanoma diagnosis – which both of them beat!
We had a lot of reasons to ride today, which was good because today was pretty tough! It’s really getting hot out here lately which makes it a little bit harder on us to be out on the blacktop in the middle of the day. We are making sure to drink a ton of water and eat a lot of fruit. Today was only 62 miles but took it out of us quite a bit, however we still got to our stayover pretty early and got to chillax.
Our stayover today is a campground! Our first time camping together. It’s not quite as furnished as the churches we are accustomed to sleeping at, but it’s really fun to be all together at this beautiful campsite. To make things really better, it has nice bathrooms including showers. We also got a BUNCH of food donations tonight: 5 Blaze pizzas, 5 Pizza Ranch pizzas, enough Olive Garden to feed 20 people, 17 sandwiches from Great Harvest, and gift cards to Taco John’s. We might be camping but we are feasting big time!!!
A HUGE rider shout-out to Brad for making most of the calls to get food donations. It makes a huge difference after a long day to eat delicious food and not have to cook. Brad also was incredibly helpful today and lifted everyone up even through all of the heat.
It’s our last night in South Dakota already!?!? Tomorrow we will bike up to Mount Rushmore and into Wyoming.