Even though we had a short day planned, we still tried to wake up early and get a good start on the day since we had so much to do once we reached Carbondale. 65°, sunny, no wind, just perfect conditions for the beginning of our ride. Then boom! Big hill within minutes of leaving Goreville. It’s unbelievable how NOT flat this country is, even in parts of the country that are not supposed to be particularly mountainous! But after a little bit of a early start, we ended up riding through some really beautiful rolling hills through beautiful farms where on the back roads with no traffic. It was awesome! Then we ended up riding through Crab Orchard wildlife refuge and we were deep in a beautiful forest and felt like we had the entire forest to ourselves for like 5 miles. We were alone in nature, which happens a lot on this journey, but I’m still so happy every time. We forget about how awesome nature is when living in cities and houses. We popped out of the forest at Grassy Lake where we stopped and fed the doggy, watched the big family of 10 big Canadian geese roam around, and watched one lone fisherman trolling slowly along the shoreline. It was the epitome of a serene moment! Before you know it, we gently rolled up and down and ended up in Carbondale. We made a beeline for the bike shop, the first one along our route in a few hundred miles, to pick up some chamois butter. Then we sat down in the shade at City Hall and we looked online at Walmart and Verizon to try to find deals Google Pixel phone. As it turns out, looking online and even trying to call the local Verizon store What is fruitless, so we just decided to ride the mile and a half off route in the opposite direction of where we were traveling to the Verizon store directly. It was an easy ride, the pretty trafficking, and when I got to the Verizon store we had to wait almost an hour for someone to help us. But we had no other option. Vanesa decided on the top of the line Google Pixel 6 Pro for $999, but they gave her a $400 trade-in on her BROKEN Google Pixel 2 XL!! What!?!? Amazing! The Verizon guy said it’s not because the broken phone is worth that much, but because Verizon is working hard to keep people as customers and wants to incentivize them to remain with the company by giving good trade-in value on new phones. The catch? You can’t pay for the phone outright. You have to pay for it in monthly installments with no interest over three years and if you leave Verizon within three years, you have to pay back the amount of the trade-in subsidy that you received over that time. So they hook you. But we’re not intending to leave Verizon anytime soon anyway so it’s a risk worth taking. After the representative got her phone connected we took off and rode a really nice highway ride with a big shoulder and a tail wind the approximately 10 miles to Murphysboro. We had to stop at a Walmart along the way to look for a phone screen protector for the new phone because the Verizon store is out of stock, turns out Walmart didn’t sell them. So Vanesa has to be really careful with the phone until we get somewhere where she can buy a screen protector. Our spirits lifted even further when we arrived at the Holiday Inn Express, this hotel chain that we really love. It’s always really nice and really comfortable and really clean and the people are really nice and we leave feeling really well rested and really well-fed by their really great included breakfast. Really!! And when we arrived, I told the manager that the person that we had booked with over the phone had quoted us a rate higher than I thought I had seen online, $130 versus $113, and asked if there was a chance that they could give us a discount. She said “how does $109 sound?”. Amazing! I love this place!! We went upstairs and put the bikes in the room and got out of her dirty cycling clothes and showered, washed our bike shorts, and plug our phones in. This is a common thing we have to do every day regardless of where we stay. And I looked online and found a local pizza place and Vanesa started grooming and bathing the dog in the hotel bathtub. I was frustrated to learn when we arrived here, however, that the warranty replacement for my leaking air pillow that I had had sent to me at this hotel via 2-3 day Priority Mail 10 days ago to this hotel, had never arrived. I went into my email and looked at the tracking history and determined that it had been delivered just yesterday to the Murphysboro post office and it said “insufficient address“ so it never arrived at the hotel but was being held at the post office. It turns out that the company has not written in Holiday Inn express and package, only Vanessa‘s name, and the hotel is on a new road so everyone here is confused about the actual address of the hotel. But whatever. I’ll just go get to the post office on my bike and get it, right? No. As it turns out it’s Memorial Day weekend and today, which is Saturday, the post office closed at 11:30 AM and it was now 4 o’clock. On a whim, though, I called the post office and miraculously, someone answered!!! I told her my situation, that if I couldn’t get the package today I would never be here to get it because I was leaving town it wouldn’t be around when they open up three days from now on the Tuesday after Memorial Day. She was not particularly friendly but she took pity on me anyway and said that if I came down to the post office right now and entered throughthe glass doors and then knocked on the locked wooden door, she would bring me the package if I had Vanesa’s ID with me since the package was addressed to her. Fantastic!! So I did just that, rode my bike the half mile, got my package, and then stopped at Martel’s Pizza on the way back to order food. After a confusing ordering process trying to substitute tomatoes for green peppers, and trying to get the cook to leave the meat off of Vanesa‘s side but add it to my side, and then the cashier not knowing how to input the orders into the computer, calculate the correct price, or give me the correct change, I ultimately ended up getting the pizza. It didn’t have the tomatoes on it after all that so she gave me fresh tomatoes on the side that I could add myself. No worries. I rode back to the hotel and Vanesa and I ate our pizza together for dinner, and then after a few brief minutes lounging in the bed with Vanesa trying to continue the (complicated!) setup on her new phone, we went down to the hotel lobby to work on the cover letter for a job she’s applying for that she really really really really really really really wants. We have been waiting for nearly a week to get to a place that had a good computer where we would be able to work on the cover letter and her resume, rather than trying to do it on what initially was a cell phone with a mostly-functioning screen (which later completely broke, as you know). We actually had stopped at a Western Kentucky library in Webster County to try to do this a couple days ago, but the computers were so antiquated that they took 15 minutes to load the Google Drive and documents that she needed to get to, and then once they were visible on the screen, the computer promptly screwed up all the formatting and then we were unable to edit it to change it!! So we left, rode a couple more days, and planned to fix it here in the Holiday Inn Express lobby in Murphysboro so she can get it submitted by next week’s deadline. We fixed the cover letter before going to sleep, with the plan of getting up and editing the resume in the morning, gorging ourselves at the awesome Holiday Inn Express breakfast, and then RIDING BIKES!!!! Wooooooo hoooooo!!!!