Tour of Arkansas

Travel Day 1
Courtney and I (Nat) left for Arkansas on Tuesday evening for the long haul into Kansas. With two boxes of food, loads power bars and gels, bike tools, and two bikes on top we were ready to rock the pants, er um overalls, off Arkansas. We arrived in Hayes with heavy eyelids for a cheap hotel room with internet after we got a tip from a local on the where abouts for a cheap hotel room. The next morning we had plenty of time so we went for a ride in lovely Hayes. As you can see on the map Hayes is not very big and its surrounded by nothing so we tried out best. Every side road that we turned on eventually turned into loose dirt forcing us to turn around but we eventually got about an hour or so in. This was important since stage 1 was tomorrow and it wasn't good to sit in a car all day before hand. After our breakfast at the local Village Inn we were back on the road and quickly headed south through Wichita and into Oklahoma. My Google directions were serving us well into Russellville until we had to locate the house of our hosts. We stopped by the local race hotel to get our race packets and then onto the host house. We were stationed about ten miles north out of town in a little town called Dover. My directions pointed us the wrong way and we ended up on a dead end gravel road in the middle of the night. After dodging the low lying limbs to prevent damage to our race machines we finally made it back on the right track and got directions after calling our hosts. We stayed with Diane and Marvin Morgan, the family dog Nugget, and Marble the cat. Diane and Marvin graciously accepted us into their home for the next two nights and even fed us.
After 1,000 miles of driving we were ready to ride and get the first stage of the Tour of Arkansas under way. Courtney was having some trouble with his front derailleur so being a bike mechanic I took a look at it and was able to fix it by adjusting its position on the braze on clamp. This really didn't go very far in getting it tip top since the next day his rear hanger somehow got bent before the first stage which was also eventually fixed. After tinkering we went to the local car wash we had spotted during our late night dirt road excursion to wash our bikes. I was a little skeptical at first of taking a high pressure hose to my bike but after some convincing Courtney showed my how. After all our bike shenanigans I tried not to think of how difficult tomorrow was going to be and just concentrate on getting some sleep. We said goodnight to our hosts to catch as much sleep as possible for the day ahead.