We Got Guts!

Day 24
Abilene to Ranger

Today is exciting and very sad at the same time, as I ride out of Abilene away from our daughters and son we don't get to see often, I am sad and do not feel like moving on. I do on the other hand have new friends to meet today in Ranger, which has helped to get me back on the bike.

But first things first----I had to pick up my bike from Bike World. I can not give them enough of a thank you for the tune up they performed on the bike. I brought it in with 1,500 miles on it with nothing more than a cleaning of the chain on the first day being done to it. The shifter picked up a phantom shift and was dirty and noisy. Gary cleaned, tightened, and torqued everything back to new. The cassette had loosened up, the non drive side spokes were loose, and it was filthy. Gary--you did such a good job I was bored and did not even have the sounds of the pedals turning to break the monotony of parts of the day, but thank you for a job well done!!!!

A member of the Colon Club message boards read my call that I posted back on April 7th, to meet others in my travels, and responded that his parents live in Ranger and he set it up so that My dad and I were able to stay with them for the evening.

The road to Abilene was again along the access roads of I-20, but this is starting to get prettier form the aspect of flowers. The bluebonnets are coming out and are beautiful, along with Indian Paintbrush, and so many more colors all along the way.

When I arrived (after riding 3 extra miles because I missed a turn) I was pretty tired, We introduced ourselves to the Kimbroughs', and were invited into their home. I have to comment here a little about their home it is a bit unusual but beautiful just the same. Their house is an old Chevrolet dealership that went defunct in 1968, they have purchased this bowstring truss roofed building and built a beautiful apartment into what was originally the parts room and Showroom. The Kimbroughs live with their dog Thomas who was quite a bit of fun. The garage area that surrounds their apartment is where the stove, smoker, workshop, extra bathroom and a whole lot of storage is. They can cook all day and never heat up their apartment - very ingenious, and effective.

We were treated to a wonderful Lasagna dinner, and then treated to a bit of history of the area. It seems that Ranger, back in 1918 - 1919 was quite the oil boom town of some 30,000 people. They had every car dealership known at the time, and if you did not get a parking spot on main street you had to walk quite the distance to be on main street at night. The Kimbroughs owned the truck stop in town at one time, and then the local diner for some 20 years, so when I tell you the food was good you can rest assured it was GOOD!

After a while we got to talking about Mike, Mike is a stage IV colon cancer survivor from the colon club. I was amazed to hear his story as it seemed to be similar to my story and he had the same attitude I had and then some! Mike never believed anything but survival and made sure to tell his doctors this very quickly. His story is different than mine in that he has had more extensive liver involvement than I had, but has persevered through over a year of chemo now and is currently 16 months past his diagnosis date!( I did meet mike, but I will talk about that in another post)

I felt good knowing that I can be at his parents home and show them that stage IV is not always terminal....There is hope. Sometimes people just need to see it for themselves to believe it.
We were offered a place to sleep for the night in a beautiful 1984 travel trailer in the garage, we soon turned in a had a wonderful nights rest.

The Garmin information for the day is as follows:

Day 22 Abilene to Ranger by wegotguts at Garmin Connect - Details