We left Scott City around 7 AM. We got to say goodbye to Dan and Evelyn the hotel proprietors because we accidentally locked the door at checkout having forgotten our cheese and coffee in the motel refrigerator. They were awake and in the lobby and kindly let us in to retrieve it. We hit the road with an extremely nice tailwind, But the road out of Scott city was awful. There was tons of traffic, nearly no shoulder, and lots of big semi trucks. Not coincidentally, this is where three competitors in the Trans Am bike race were hit and killed by vehicles in 2018 and 2019. We were extremely aware of this fact, and I had remembered riding through here in 2010, so we were incredibly alert. We stopped by the John Egbers memorial that was erected recently in honor of his passing in the 2019 race. It really hits home when you see a memorial for someone who died doing some thing that you’re currently doing and we wanted to stop at the memorial and pay our respects. Though we looked, we never saw the Eric Fishbein memorial but it exists somewhere out here, and there is no memorial for the other rider who was killed, TC Cheng. This was a depressing stretch of road for another reason too. We passed multiple cattle feedlots into which we saw crammed thousands of cows in horrific living conditions with no shade and no water. Even for me who is not vegetarian, it was hard to see and made me not want to ever eat another hamburger, and you can imagine how my vegetarian/vegan wife Vanesa felt about it. As we got more and more through western Kansas and closer and closer to the eastern Colorado border, the scenery began to change. More desolation, less farming, more scrub brush. It’s pretty ugly out here in my opinion, and I was really glad we had a tailwind pushing us along to help us arrive in our destination of Sheridan Lake, Colorado before it got too hot. We stopped in Tribune, Kansas, got some gatorades and snacks, got our shirts and bandannas wet along with soaking the dog, and then we continued on with a great ride…but at some point the ride turned nasty when the biting flies came out. It wasn’t too bad at first but they got worse and worse and our high speed and the strong wind didn’t seem to deter them at all. They were around for probably 20 miles and they bit through our shirts through our shorts through our socks. It was horrific. It was hell. I honestly thought Vanesa was going to crash because not only was she constantly trying to swap the flies off of herself but she was half turned around using her hand to keep the flies off Maui too and only had one hand on the handlebars out on this windy road and she was swerving all over the place. Thankfully there was very little traffic as we got out of Kansas and into this REMOTE Eastern Colorado wasteland. Oh, and, there are huge cracks in the pavement perpendicular to the direction of travel, spaces every 30 feet like clockwork, for miles and miles and miles and MILES. Buh-bum…………buh-bump………..buh-bump. Oh my GOD it was jarring. So - ugly, buggy, bumpy, it was ONLY made tolerable by the delicious tailwind that had us crushing it for quite a bit of the day. We rolled into the Sheridan Lake town (there is no lake, it’s a desert out here) and FINALLY got rid of the flies once we passed 20mph of speed on the downhill into town. We hurried into the convenience store for respite from the flies and drank sodas while the gal made V a salad and me a sandwich. There is a church hostel at the Sheridan Lake church and I’d spoken with the pastor yesterday who’d told me it’s open 24-7, and to come on in and make ourselves comfortable whenever. He said there was a full kitchen to cook our food and that we were welcome to eat whatever church food was in the kitchen as well. So kind. When we left the convenience store we were immediately swarmed inviting flies again and we made it the quarter-mile to the church we were already at our wits end. I found the open door and rolled the bike inside and Vanesa quickly followed and we shut the door before too many flies could get in. We looked around and saw that this is a wonderful space provided by this church and the kitchen was amazing with many food options for us to choose from for both snacks and dinner as well as breakfast if we wanted it. This church hospital was among the best of any that we’ve seen on the entire trip. After we used the restroom, got some water, and fiddled with our gear a bit, I noticed the list of cyclist guidelines that was on one of the tables. Guideline number one was “don’t bring the bikes inside the church“. I read the rule to Vanesa but we decided that it would actually be worse for both us and the church if we wheeled our bikes back outside again because we would have to be going to and from our bikes multiple times which would just expose us to more biting flies and bring more biting flies into the church. We decided it was a better idea to just leave them inside the church. We were very considerate and didn’t wheel them on the carpet but left them on the tiled floor area just inside the door. I figured that if any church people showed up I’d just explain the situation and we’d be fine. We inflated our sleeping pads, toileted Maui outside, and were laying down trying to sleep by 545 pm, in hopes of sleeping some before leaving at about midnight or 1 am so we could try to get in a good 88 miles to Ordway tomorrow in favorable wind/heat (and especially BITING FLIES) conditions. At 620 a guy came in through a side door and walked right by the foot of my sleeping pad. Maui was sleeping next to me and woofed at him a little but didn’t bark. I smiled and introduced myself (and Vanesa who was laying on her pad across the room) and asked it he was Pastor Ernie that I’d spoken with on the phone yesterday. He said yes but did not smile and immediately asked it I’d seen the cyclist guidelines. I said yes and proceeded to start telling him the story about the biting flies and how we were swarmed and attacked and the church was our respite and. He just interrupted me, didn’t care one bit about why we broke the rule, and then moved on to how he couldn’t believe we brought a dog into his church, how inconsiderate we were, how anyone should know you can’t do that (it wasn’t on the guidelines). I (now we, because V had gotten up from her pad and come over to where we were) started telling him that Maui is a licensed service dog not a pet and to at she has public access. He said “not here” and that he doesn’t know anything about service dogs but the dog has to go outside for the night. In 30 mph wind, in the dark, alone, in rattlesnake country? Come on, dude. Really? He said he doesn’t bro g his dog into church and expects others won’t either, that he doesn’t want our dog peeing and pooping in his church. All along V and I were trying to educate him about service dog public access law but he would not hear it, and he also kept going back to the bikes being inside and how disappointed he was in us and that they love to support cyclists but that he just can’t believe how we could do what we’d done in his church. I apologized for the bikes being inside, again explaining why they were inside (he had ZERO empathy about the swarming biting flies) but told him I would immediately take them outside, and to please understand that we needed to stay there and stay inside and that we could not leave our dog outside. And then he said he was going to call the cops so he could “learn more about this service dog thing”. And he disappeared toward somewhere else in the church where his office is. We were stunned. This pastor Ernie was so non-empathetic, interrupting, and almost childlike. He couldn’t have a conversation and hear our points of view at ALL. We laid there for an hour u til he walked right by Vanesa, and looked at her and didn’t say a word right before he walked out the door. Fifteen minutes after he left, Vanesa said to me That she thought he probably wasn’t coming back and since we would then fall asleep we got to go lock the bikes. I went outside and lock the bikes but I didn’t really believe the situation is over. Sure enough, about 15 minutes later and walks a sheriff’s deputy. Pastor Ernie didn’t just call the cops to ask about service dog lol, he called the cops on US!!! The sheriff’s deputy was surprised when Vanesa started talking to him about Maui being a service animal, and service dog public access lot. Pastor Ernie had never thought to mention to the police when he called them that the dog we had brought inside his church was a service dog. The police officer and Vanesa spoke about service dogs for several minutes and Vanesa showed him a copy of the federal law granting service dogs public access. The deputy was understanding and said that he would leave and go talk to the pastor and tell him that he had to allow the dog to stay at the church and that he would come back inside and talk to us if anything else is necessary. Oh, and at one point the cop also said “did you guys get upset with the pastor?”. The way he worded it, and the time that he used, implied to us that the pastor had told him that we were verbally abusive. That could not have been further from the truth, when talking with him we were just trying to calmly explain our points of view on the two issues (what prompted us to bring the bikes inside and that Maui is a service dog with public access), but somehow in our efforts to do that with such a poor listener it must have come across to him that way. Honestly, as the pastor, I’d bet he’s used to telling people what to do and not used to people speaking to him non-submissively in way that explains their actions because his word is the last word in that church. Anyway, neither the officer nor the pastor ever showed up inside again. I was actually both quite surprised and not surprised at all that the pastor never came in to speak with us after the policeman left. Vanesa and I had a hard time sleeping after that because of both the adrenaline and not knowing if someone’s gonna come in and talk to us again. So we only got about two hours of sleep before our alarm went off at midnight. And truly, were we not in a remote place with challenging weather, on bicycles, 27 miles away from the next services, in snake country, we would have not wanted to stay to sleep there anyway. Vanesa and I still are pretty flabbergasted at this pastor’s behavior. For a person who makes his living preaching forgiveness, listening, understanding, and love, she showed absolutely zero of any ofthat toward us. He was just a bully. I hope he learned something from this episode, although I highly doubt that he did. I hope that someone from his community that has a disability and service dog shows up one Sunday to attend church accompanied by their dog. And I’d like to think that he would let them in and not treat them the way that he treated us. When we get home, V plans to draft him a letter to educate him about service dog laws both federally and in the state of Colorado