Day 46

Mosquitoes
I slept in. I wanted to catch up on some sleep and it kinda sounded like it was raining. When I finally decided to get up, it was easy to tell that it was windy, so I knew I didn't have to worry about the mosquitoes. I could see them lined up on the inside of my rain fly. I probably could have carefully removed it and packed it into the stuff sack in order to kill them all, but I decided to just let the wind take care of them. Once I got back on the road, I immediately discovered, to my horror, that the wind had completely changed direction. It was going southeast now, but mostly south. I couldn't go east unless I went south first- I didn't want to do that since it would add a lot of miles. The first east road north was still a lot of miles away, and it went southeast- no good. The last east road was straight, but it wasn't all that far from the town in North Dakota I was heading to. I had no choice but to slowly peddle forward into the wind. The whole day was like this. I found a grocery satire that just happened to be connected to a shell station, so I loaded up on candy, cookies and chips. Oh, and sandwiches and bagels. After watching the sky change colors at the end of the day, I stumbled upon a small-ish town. I needed to use the bathroom, but the gas station was closed. I continued, hoping there would be another. I couldn't see any. There was a baseball field, with an outhouse, but it was padlocked shut. I decided to continue on through town. It was small, so I wasn't too worried about wasting time. Nothing looked open. I found the city park. Along with 12 horseshoe game spots, it had an outhouse. But this was padlocked too. Seriously, why are people so concerned with locking up poop? I left the city, hoping I could make it to the next one. The sky was beautiful- I wish I could have watched it the while time, instead of looking for a toilet. The moon was spectacular too- I heard it was a special full moon somehow. Dispite this, it got dark pretty quickly. I knew I was really close to North Dakota though, so I kept going. Finally I saw the sign. That's 14 states! There was a lot of tall grass on the plot of land that the sign was on, so I just set up camp there, as far away from the road as I could get. There were some mosquitoes, but it wasn't as bad as last night. A spider made it into my tent, but he wasn't moving, so he was easy to kill.