This day was somewhat of a rest day though we went almost a full days worth of miles. We slept in, refusing to leave our comfy sleeping bags. We only had 55 miles to go to Cedar City and there was only one climb on this leg of the trip. We had spent time preparing for sprinklers the previous night. We were on the outer fence of a baseball field and the nearby sprinklers seemed poised to awaken us at 4am with a nice shower. The city didn’t have regular trash service so everyone brought their things to a nearby dumpster. We dug through the dumpster to find things to cover the sprinklers. We eventually found boxes that were good enough and weighted them down with a whole case of otter pops that someone had thrown away. While doing this, we found a bulk package of oatmeal that had been thrown away. We decided that we could keep some of the five pound bag for our breakfast. We filled an old bagel bag with oats and boiled water on our camping stove. We convinced ourselves that pouring some boiling water in the bowl with the oatmeal and adding a spoonful of peanut butter for protein was a good breakfast. It was at least free and somewhat filling.

We eventually made our way down the road towards cedar city. The first 16 miles were through some farms. Since rain is rare, they all had to use some form of consistent irrigation. Some people even had grass lawns that depended entirely on the sprinklers inside them. Ground squirrels were plentiful, running into their holes and squeaking to warn of our passing threat

.After a long stretch of farmland, we reached the small town of Minersville. We stopped and ate our meal of peanut butter bagels and bananas outside on their picnic tables. After the town was the one and only descent. We came out of the town and immediately started the slow ascent. Over 12 miles, we traveled up 2300 feet. This sort of climb had begun mundane at this point. As we traveled up, large crickets jumped around the road, seemingly feasting on the crickets that had been squashed by cars. Every few feet of road had another cricket jumping out of the way of our tires. There was also a dead snake:

After reaching he top, we waited for a moment and called a church about staying the night. While waiting, in our tired and somewhat unconscious state, a girl walked by. We said “hi” but didn’t think much of it even though she was 12 miles away from the nearest town and had only a small backpack with her and a reflective vest. We later discovered that she was walking across the country and had started in August 2017. She was periodically picked up and dropped off by her mother and that was how she managed to carry so little with her. Our two month trip feels like a big deal but we can only imagine her year+ trip.

With a church committed to host us, we descended down what we thought would be an easy ride to Cedar City, Utah. We quickly learned that this trip would be made quite a challenge by the intense headwind which somehow managed to find the exact direction we needed to travel. Even though many of the miles were downhill, we still had to fight for every mile: We eventually reached the flat part of the countryside and had to work even harder. We eventually caught up to the retired touring cyclists we had run into the day before. Because the church office was only open during normal business hours, we needed to hurry. Our estimate of time that we gave from the top of the hill did not take into consideration the headwind that we were about to run into. What we thought was gonna be in easy cruise into Cedar City ended up being a miserable push through the wind.

We arrived at the church dehydrated and worn out but we had at least arrived. We talked to the pastor about our arrangements and made our plans for the evening. The only grocery store nearby was a family dollar a mile away. We made the trek and returned with 2 pounds of spaghetti and a run of ice cream. We finished all of it that night and slept in their sanctuary.