I don’t know what the Internet thinks of my travels, but the pond butterflies at Fort Crowder shooting range found my bicycle (and me) quite interesting:

A few of these scaly-wingers tagged along for a few meters, but they all headed back to the water well before I reached the exit. Too bad—I could have used their help lifting my gear over the gate.

Yesterday was Day 5, the final planned day of my ride from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Bentonville, Arkansas. My dear wife is coming to retrieve me today—we’ll spend this evening and all Friday enjoying the local trails and shops, then head back en auto Saturday. Knowing Wednesday was my last hard day in the saddle, I could give it my all.

Morning in Pittsburg was humid, and the radar showed rain west. But the sun wasn’t pounding yet, and the wind was down from yesterday, now just light and southwesterly. I think I can, I think I can…

But boy, all those woods and fields and curvy roads do make a guy hungry:

But then, just past Jane, Missouri, the one real disaster of the trip:

Plam! went my back tire! Grind grind grind went my less protected rim. I braked fast, looked under me, and saw a flat. The instantaneous deflation told me this was no simple thorn prick that my tire slime would fill, no nail or branch jab that I could plug. This was a one-inch tear in my rear tire. I don’t know if I hit some sharp metal or if the tire just gave out from some defect or the heat or the strain, but I didn’t spend a lot of time scanning for the cause. I was done riding. After 460 miles, just ten miles from terminus, not quite to the Arkansas border, I was done.

So, alas, the bicycling portion of my trip was only three states—Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. I don’t get to put any Arkansas miles on the Trek 1120, an otherwise mighty and comfy bike that experienced just one catastrophic failure. And boy, if the bike had to give up, it picked about the best place to quit that it could have, just a short hitch to my intended lodging rather than out in the rain Monday morning in Admire, Kansas, or any place else much farther from where I hoped to be.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (WLS) — A Burger King employee in South Dakota is retiring after 48 years.

Jane Aulner started her career with the fast food restaurant in 1976. She said the feeling of family with her coworkers is one of the reasons she never left the restaurant for nearly half a century.

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She also said she felt comfort in ggetting to know people and watching the grow.

“It warms my heart when I got somebody coming inside or come through the drive through, they go ‘Wow, you’re still here. Do you remember me?’” she said. “And they’ll tell me their name like maybe I trained them or had them when they were in college, before they moved off and got married and had their own lives. So that was, that was really fun.”

As much as Aulner’s coworkers made an impact on her, they said she has left an impression on them.

“She’s huge, she’s the cornerstone,” said manager Belvie Kennerly. “I mean, you can’t do anything without a team member like June to help keep things running for you.”