2014-07-27: Day 32 The Earth is Flat, Pittsburg to Coyville, KS

We covered 89 miles of flat Kansas terrain today. We had our typical daily average of 60 miles ridden by lunch time and decided to push on. There are some gentle uphill grades out here but not enough to make you shift into climbing gears. Today winds were out of the north and light – not even a factor. We are gaining momentum after clearing the Ozarks in Missouri. Not even a train can stop us now! Today we met a couple of cyclist that had started in Seattle and were headed for Washington DC. We came upon them as they were talking with a family of farmers. Teresa had also stopped at the same location to wait for us.

We saw a number of what appeared to be oil pumps today. I asked the farmer about them. He said they were actually Natural Gas pumps. Then he gave us some background information:

• The pumps work on timers so they don’t always pump.
• The pumps produce differing levels of Natural Gas depending on how they are configured.
• The company engineers don’t know what they are doing. He has personal experience tweaking the pumps and could get more volume out of the them. (his opinion)
• The company that owns the pumps pay the farmers 16.25% of the profits made from the Natural Gas extracted from the farmer’s property.

Teresa told us later that the wife in the farming family had been playing the harmonic for the group prior to us showing up. Too bad we missed that.

As a final note, look carefully at this list from the Welcome to Coyville kid’s park sign. I wish they had more detail on that last item on the next to last line. Click on the pic if you need to see a bigger image. Hope they were talking about a bad guy.