Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Day 30: Resting in Hutch

Ah... a rest day. After breakfast, our first priority was to find the bike shop.

The bike shop, Harley's, was the first real bike shop we'd seen since St Louis. They said they'd look over the bike and get back to use a few hours later. Since the library was just down the street, we traveled there to wait. We alternated reading It's Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong and blogging. I managed to read the entire book, but Jillian only got about 40% through (I blog a lot faster than she does).

The library was helpful in another way. Since Clinton, MO our little camera had been broken. In order to take photos we'd needed to stop the bike to let Jillian out to get her big DSLR. We'd so far been unable to find a camera shop that could repair our little camera, and it was beginning to look like we'd need to wait until Denver. But while sitting at a little table in the library I was able to clean enough to the lens mechanism that the camera miraculously started working again. We were ecstatic.

After lunch at Subway, we returned to the bike shop. There we heard the bad news. Our chain was dying. We could decide to replace it, but we'd likely need to replace the cassette as well. Otherwise the cassette would just chew up the new chain and we'd be replacing it in Colorado anyway. Additionally, there was something wrong with our freewheel that was causing the clanging. New parts might take a week. And there was nothing that could be done about our brakes - no one had seen our type of disc brakes before. I got a new helmet, we had the bike lubed up, and then we rode it back to the Days Inn. A rather depressing stop.

By the time we were back to the hotel, the local salt mine was already closed. Jillian was very depressed by this, since she'd been hoping to do some real tourist activities for once. We settled on hiking to the mall in order to see the latest Harry Potter. The movie theater was within walking distance at the Hutchinson mall. Unfortunately, this turned out to be The Worst Mall Ever (we wrote a song). Many store fronts were empty, the mall was small, the parking lot had standing water in it, and the theater was there, but it wasn't actually part of the mall. They just shared a wall, which was very confusing and caused us to have to walk through the back of a home improvement store in order to find the actual theater entrance. Even then, we discovered that the lines were long. So we gave up on Harry Potter, and instead went to Chili's house of horrors.

I had never been to a Chilis. Our awkward waiter brought us bowl after bowl of free tortilla chips. We settled on getting the 2 for $20 deal, which included an appetizer, two entrees, and a desert. Before we were even done with the entrees, we started feeling sick. It was too much food. Dessert put us over the top, and we shuffled to Target to purchase new ziplock bags and other supplies. Our stomachs were killing us, and we swore off Chilis forever. Next stop was the hotel, where we crashed on the bed and watched HGTV at length, hoping our stomachs would eventually feel even a little bit better.

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