July 30 In Wichita With Random Thoughts While Eating

Seafood and Taco Shop home cooked food in Guymon OK

A wonderful day for a storm, one where I have planned ahead to rest. Tonight I will go to the Peace and Justice Center to see the movie, "Resistencia: The Film”, the story of the 2009 coup in Honduras. 

David Swanson’s website War is A Crime picked up on my bicycle ride. 

<http://warisacrime.org/content/bicycling-peace-and-environmental-justice-halfway-across-country-now>

I really admire his work and his book of the same name is fascinating. 

Mostly I meet people at restaurants. there were the two young men in Guymon OK in the restaurant pictured above, Ramon and Noe. It appeared to me that they were working in their mother’s place. It was my first stop in Guymon for a cold drink. After that I went to the only bicycle store in hundreds of miles, or so it seemed, but they must have been on vacation as no one showed up all day. When I went back to the restaurant Seafood and Taco Shop for dinner Ramon asked about my trip and was excited when I told him how the Washington DC militarists angered me last fall with all their talk of war in the Ukraine that I decided to ride my bike across the country. 

It is not very often that I get the opportunity to tell people of my efforts. This is corn country, King Corn and the bible. When I feel that those I am speaking to will be receptive I tell them why I am riding. With others, like the couple just outside of Meade KS, I keep it just friendly conversation. Bicycling cross country sounded good to him when he was a teen, but he had no one to ride with him. I can agree the riding is lonely and youthful legs would be great. And then there were the nice older ladies yesterday who meet at McDonalds a few days a week before their bible class. I sat with them and we talked about the wheat crop that survived an inopportune rain, selling their homegrown tomatoes at the local park, and the prospect of rain.  

Each section is roughly 100 feet long and I have seen 20 connected together.  They irrigate the corn fields by rotating  about one end creating arc with very long radii. It has been said that there is so much corn under irrigation that the evaporation is changing the climate.