Hutchinson to Wichita. Today we saw corn, corn and more corn. We got up at 5:00 to begin our trip to Wichita. A strong storm came through over night to cool things down and remain cloudy. It was a fifty mile trek. We wanted to get into a large city to restock ourselves with a couple new tires, tubes and CO2 cartridges to pump up our tires. The cartridges are a marvelous discovery to rapidly pump up the tires, seconds vs. 10-15 minutes and a lot of arm energy. My rear tire is about to peel off like a retread tire on a semi truck. We rode into Wichita at 1:30 and very tired. We had directions to the bicycle shop and we were on our way. The woman at the store told us 2-3 miles to get there. Guess again Miss Geographer, 11 miles! We picked up two new tires for my bike and replaced the rear tire while at the shop. The new tires are called, Armadillo tires. The bike store said they will not get flat for the rest of our trip home. We will see. We cycled by the home headquarters and factory for the famous Cessna airplane company. Wichita has a population of 375,000 people making it the 51st largest city in America and the largest city in Kansas. The name Wichita means, "town with winds out of the south". It means "difficult, frustrating city to ride into" to cyclists. Deb took a short break with the temps above 100 degrees to eat an ice cream. We have been drinking so much water our appetites are poor. Every stop we make, we have been drinking a lot of whole milk, either regular or chocolate. No need to worry about putting on pounds. We just came back from having a huge homecooked meal at a diner. We spoke with the manager about our trip during the meal for five minutes. When we were ready to pay for the bill, the waiter said that the meal was on the house. We have met a lot of very generous people on this trip.
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