Lincoln, 17 miles, an easy day.

We get up early to get to Lincoln in time for what we expect to be limited Saturday hours at the post office. We are eagerly anticipating a re-supply box, our first of six. We are on the road at the earliest hour yet, just after 8:00. We ride just 17 gravel and dirt miles from Reservoir Lake to get to town by ten, knowing that most the post offices open for only a couple hours on Saturday. We find the post office quickly, everything is on the one road through town. We get off our bikes, stash our helmets and gloves and go to the door. They are not open on Saturdays. That means we’ll have to wait until Monday morning to get our package. That will put us behind. I’m feeling terrible, as I have done the supply-box planning and should have noticed this very important detail. We feel sunk. We’re not wanting to spend an unplanned rest day in this quiet tourist town, we’d rather do that in the woods somewhere. Oh darn!

But wait! There’s a guy coming out of the office who says hi to us! We ask him if he could check for a package for us, we’re cyclists in need of our re-supply box. He’s happy to go back and check, and comes out with not only that box, but the other one sent to me by my aunt Judy with straps for my panniers. Goody! Yippee! We got lucky! That’s one of the great things about small towns.

We spend the afternoon enjoying a local lunch, a small art show, and hearing talk of the fires. We do a little grocery shopping. We stay in a beautiful (and cheap!) RV park where we get a quiet spot under a tree on the grass by a bubbling creek. We have been lucky to find great spots in the towns we’ve stayed.