Thursday morning was another beautiful sunny day as we gathered outside our days inn motel in Spencer Iowa. Today's ride to Sheldon Iowa was a straight shot west, with not many options. We ended up riding west on Hwy B24 to Hartley, and on busy Hwy 18 into Sheldon.
We met a father and son riding to the start of RAGBRAI from Madison Wisconsin. it will be their first RAGBRAI, so we talked with them about what fun they'll have.
Our first stop of the day was about a mile down the road at the Spencer library, where we paid our respects to Dewy Readmore Books, the world-famous Spencer library cat.
We had to wait a few minutes for the library to open. When we went inside we saw lots of statues, art and other information about Dewey.
The library staff gave us a nice tour of the library, showing us all the places Dewey would play and hang out. You can read more about Dewey the library cat at:
This is a pretty little quilted cat made by a first grade class in Italy. The class was reading a book about Dewey and all the students made little quilted cats.
We got to go way back into the library offices to see the book depository where Dewey was left on a freezing January morning. He was a lucky cat to have survived that!
After we left the Spencer library, we stopped at a HyVee grocery store on the way out of town for a delicious breakfast. We had been looking forward to eating breakfast at a HyVee all week - It's always a big deal for us folk from Florida.
I stopped along Hwy B24 to take this picture of a little grave in the front yard of a farmhouse. It looked fun and whimsical from the road, but as I was taking the picture I was wondering if it might be a real grave ?
We pulled into Steve's bar and Grill in Hartley, the only bar in town. Unfortunately, they don't serve alcohol anymore so we just had a Coke and hamburger.
This is what busy highway 18 looks like. It has big shoulders that bicycles can ride on, but it's full of cracks and holes.
We ran into a heavy 20 mph SW headwind on Hwy 18, and we were really blown around by all the speeding big trucks.
Danny got a flat tire and was nice enough to let me change it. I love to change flat tires!
We stopped at Samson's Corvette store in Sanborn Iowa. There was a nice young man with a friendly Brittany spaniel who told us all about the Corvettes he had for sale.
Here's some interesting yard art in Sanborn Iowa.
We stopped at Jay's supper club in Sanborn for a roast beef dinner and beers.
It was about 5:30 when we got to Sheldon Iowa. We went downtown to the JB bar for a while before stopping at the hotel.
There's only one more day of IARBGAR - tomorrow we join our friends in the Team Sprint bicycle gang, and head west back to Guttenberg with RAGBRAI !
