Leroy's 73 miles

Hello,

Leroy just called and told me that he is just five miles from the end. He had trouble finding food in the town where he stopped because they had run out of many things.

His legs are tired. He did have to walk part way up a couple hills. Will that count against him? Today there was 5,096 feet of climb. My legs might have been tired too.

He still has not found the group that he is to be connected with. He is not able to access his voice mail on this cell phone so they may have tried unsuccessfully to reach him. There was no phone service after he left Council Bluffs. Cell phone service in the US is the pits. Even though we are in hills it is not mountains.

“You should have taken care of that voice mail before you left home,” I said.

“I don’t know what to do about it,” he said.

“You should call the company,” I said.

“Now that I have been chastised, I am going to say good-bye,” he said.

“Oops! Sorry about that, but I have been stewing about it. I will talk about more pleasant things,” I said.

Why did I do that when I know he knows about the problem? The urge to dash in and fix it raced to the forefront?

Three boys were loitering by the library bike rack.

“Are you going on RAGBRAI?” one of them wanted to know.

“I am just commuting around town,” I replied.

“What does commute mean?” he asked.

“For me it means riding around town and doing errands,” I said.

“What are errands,” this late elementary or jr. high student wanted to know. Are vocabularies limited? Seems to me to be the case. Maybe no one speaks with children so they have a hard time just absorbing the language.

Paula