OSCAR!!!

July 27 – Day 28

Oscar!!!

After an excellent sweaty nights sleep in humid Toronto Lake State park, we got off to an early start to get some breakfast at the bustling town of Toronto. Basically there is only one place to get any food in town, which is the convenience store, where we filled up on honey buns, six packs of powdered donuts, and coffee; all the nutrition we needed for a full day of biking. A common theme of all the breakfast joints we end up going to is all of the farmers gather early in the morning and sit around a table or chairs to get their day started. One of the farmers that we met this morning was Clay Payne, who at 90 years old is still managing his farm with 80 head of cattle. Pretty amazing and we can only hope to still be around and not drooling on ourselves by that point, let alone working. He gave us his address so we can send him a picture of when we reach San Francisco.

As for the biking, the towns are starting to become more spread out with very little in between. The hills are becoming fewer and further between, longer with much milder inclines and this will very quickly lead to the flat as a pancake Kansas that we have heard about and think we look forward to.

We ended up going slightly over 100 miles to get to Newton and meet with Liz who works at the Prairie Harvest Health Store downtown. We had heard from the East bounder, Mike, a few days prior that Liz was putting cyclists up in her place for the summer. She had completed the trip last year and was nice enough to put us up for the night as a fellow Trans-American cyclist. She said that having the bikers stay with her this summer was similar to her experience last year on the trail, meeting all these people, but without the actual biking part. Liz was actually house-sitting for a few weeks and gave us the address of the place, but would not be able to meet us there until she got out of work at 10. The one catch was that this family’s dog, Oscar, was there and was not too fond of males so she said to let him out in the backyard if he was causing any problems. Once we get to the house, Lee walks into the house while I am fiddling with the bike trying to find a parking space for it. Immediately I hear a yappy little bark going to town, with a muffled, “heeeeyyyy Oscar, why don’t you go outside”. That is just what Oscar did, but not the door that Lee was holding open to the backyard. I see this little black blur shoot out of the house and run to driveway, pause, look at me for a split second with a knowing glance of, ‘your going to regret this sucker…’. He then bolts towards neighborhoods that we are both obviously very unfamiliar with. We immediately run out and start chasing this little guy, but our 100+ mile biking legs are no match for the little black flash that has been cooped up in the house all day. We start scouring the neighborhoods on foot and a terrible realization starts to come set in after 15 minutes of not seeing a trace of this guy, ‘a couple of strangers may have just lost a family’s’ beloved dog that was being house-sat by a trusted friend’. We run back to the house to grab the bikes without the trailers to comb the neighborhood better. Very angry Oscar chants were being shouted around the neighborhood with us chasing down anything that resembled a bark. We asked anyone we saw if they had seen a little black dog on the loose. I asked one man playing catch with his son about the dog and he took my information in case he turned up. After about 40 minutes of searching and our fear that we lost this family’s dog getting stronger, we really lucked out. The man playing catch with his son, who turned out to be a vet, had gotten in his car and joined the search. He had spotted the dog a couple of blocks away and we followed him there. We spotted Oscar, who immediately spotted us and turned the other way and ran as fast as his little legs would take him, which also turned out to be about as fast as our bikes would go. We started a Dukes of Hazard style chase of this dog through the neighborhood, front yards, sidewalks, and a little park. Fortunately for us, little Oscar did not have too much gas in the tank and petered out almost right back where we started. We put the little guy in the FENCED IN backyard and breathed a sigh of relief, then started cussing the little guy out for putting us through his chase.

We spent some time with Liz once she returned from work and thanked her again for the place to stay. We told her about our chase of Oscar, which she found very humorous and who she thinks is the cutest little dog ever. From our experience with Oscar, we have to disagree…

-Brent

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