Saturday, December 13, 2008

Kansas Days 6-7, or... Kansas has had enough of me

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm down on Kansas. I'm not. The parts we visited were beautiful, we really enjoyed them. I for one will probably visit again some day.

But, on this trip, there was definitely an unseen force trying to move us along. Remember yesterday I mentioned ticks and mosquitoes but only told you a tick story? Well, today, you're going to get a mosquito story...

But first.. We meet up with Jason on his private land. Today this trip officially starts to pay off in good riding.

Jason is one of the Kansas City Freeride crew and he's a ripper. He's built a little freeride oasis in the middle of a shimmering field of corn. There isn't much else around these parts.

As you can see here in this picture of my truck in "the parking lot"...















Let the games begin...















Here is Jason's giant wall ride...














and his even bigger step-up, step-down move...














From what I understand only a handful of people have ever hit it. I declined... as I was still feeling light headed from my run in with the army of ticks. Hey, that's my story and I'm sticking to it...

Jason on the other hand made it look easy.



















Here are some highlights of the line, in sequence:








































































The skinny stuff he was working on was very fun. I love stunts like this.



















But I think I rode it backwards.















While us men were busy risking life and limb Kristi was busy photographing all sorts of little critters.


































My guess is that this little guy is a pretty successful hunter. Hellooooo there....















A few hours of shred and a couple of bails later we were spent. There's alot of pedaling in order to hit those stunts... kind of reminded me of Florida in that way. But that's about the only way.

We were so stoked that we got to hook up with Jason and ride his trail. He's very passionate about riding and building and it shows.

So, how do you cap off the best day of riding you've had thus far on an epic journey that you're just starting to settle into? Three words:

Guns...














and fire...














And perhaps some sort of a ritualistic fire dance... Aw shucks, I bet you do this for all the tourists.















That night we decided to sleep under the stars. It was warm and there was no chance of rain. So why put up a tent, when a sleeping bag will do, right?

Wrong. Kansas has large aggressive mosquito's that aren't put off by the smoke and heat of a pretty impressive fire.

No problem, I'll just wrap myself up "a-la burrito style" in my sleeping bag.

What's that?

Oh, these things will bite your ass right through a down sleeping bag. Exellent.

Plus I drank a fair amount of beer that night and it was pretty warm outside so every couple of minutes the sleeping bag needed to be opened up for some, ahem, "fresh air". That's when the mosquito's would pounce.

Add a high dew point to the equation and you get night of restless sleep in a wet sleeping bag full of angry mosquito's and a wet pillow.

Well, at least we were already on our way to breakfast when the rash broke out on my face...

Some pictures of my stop sign stop-sign-red, braille textured face and the baseball sized welts that covered most of my upper body would have really tied this post together but once again... at the time I did not find any of it funny.

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