A bonus state park for us!

Day 14 - It rained during the night, but we stayed dry in our motel room. We got up early and enjoyed the motel breakfast before packing up. We still weren't on the road until 9:00 AM. We just can't seem to break that morning pattern now, even when we have a motel stay. Of course, we did have all the technology distractions of TV, Internet and cell phone service which makes it hard to leave. We headed south on Hwy 61 and, even though it is a major highway, we continued to enjoy its wide, safe shoulder. We traveled for nearly 20 miles before stopping for an early lunch in Osceola, AR.  Yesterday we reached 500 miles on this trip and early today our bike hit its 18,000th mile!  The terrain remains flat, but we are starting to see trees again, which were nearly absent in the Missouri Bootheel.  The wind was rough on us today.  It blew 10-20 mi/hr from the SW and is the worst wind since we left the Katy Trail.  The temperature grew much warmer throughout the day and we suffered as we had to work so hard against the wind in 90+ degrees.  We took a long break in Wilson, AR. at the Hampson Archeological Museum State Park.  This was not a scheduled stop, but we couldn't resist visiting the museum when we saw that it was a state park.  One of our lifetime "bucket list" goals is to visit every state park in the U.S. (not by bicycle!), so when we saw this state park right next to the road we had to stop, plus it gave us a much needed rest.  With 15 miles left to travel, we turned to the SE and for the first time of the day we had a helpful wind.  This was really important because we were really tired.  Unfortunately, the front tire started getting low and we had a delay to work on it.  I first just pumped it up again since it was a slow leak, hoping that we could make it to a motel before it got low again, but after 2 miles it needed more air, so I had to change the tire.  We found a post office in a tiny town we were passing through which provided us a little shade from the hot sun.  It was after 5:00 PM and the post office closed at 4:30 PM, so we thought it was OK to use the shade provided by the building.  After I had the tire off of the bicycle, a lady came out of the post office and we had to listen to her lecture us for 10 minutes about how horrible we were for working on our bike in a post office parking lot.  This lady definitely had an overly inflated opinion of her importance.  We are talking about a post office building smaller than my living room and a town smaller than a Wal-Mart parking lot!  We had to listen to a sermon about the danger of terrorists and how she should call the police.  I kept my temper and bit my tongue, but both Geri and I agreed the terrorists have beat this woman.  She lives in fear and tries to let everyone else know about it.  Just before I finished repairing the tire, a man drove by and asked if we needed help.  My opinion of this tiny town improved greatly.  He wasn't surprised the post master gave us a hard time.  He suggested that she was really hard to deal with.  I got the tire repaired and we continued toward West Memphis, AR.  We had the pedal 2 miles out of our way to reach a motel.  It is always surprising to me that we can pass through a small town and see 2 or 3 motels in a few blocks, then we get to a big city and we can't find any motels!  Finally we were in a room after covering 68.9 miles today and averaging 11 mi/hr against a hot wind most of the day.  Our maximum speed today was only 19 mi/hr providing evidence for the level roads we are traveling on.  Geri and I reached a small rise in the road at an intersection during the day and we joked about the huge hill since we were able to coast down the other side of the intersection for about 30 yards.  A Waffle House was located right beside our motel and we enjoyed a much needed refueling before bedtime which occurred this evening without any journaling or blogging!  PS. Geri forced me to put in the video of me singing.  My apologies to all!!