Onward to Kensington

The volunteers in Atwood, trail boss Charlie Henderson and key master Jim Kraychy, had the pizzas flying in and out of the oven as riders got their first drop bag access and a bed.

Jim Kraychy, John Lee Ellis and Charlie Henderson taking a break from wrangling drop bags at the start

Charlie hit the road before dawn to ride herd on our thirty-four intrepids. Overnight the wind died down and temperatures stayed in the mid 50's F, even warmer further east. Through the middle of the night there was heavy fog, enough to condense on eyeglasses and otherwise be disconcerting to riders hoping to be seen as well as see.

Jim Kraychy called in with all of the Atwood Outbound times and they are now on the updated Rider Progress. Be sure to reload the web page if you have viewed it before as an older cached version may get displayed instead of the most recent posting of 8:48. And remember that official Last Chance Time stays with Mountain Daylight Time in all locations.

Meanwhile, Guy Oldfield of Burr Oak, Kansas, held vigil through the graveyard shift at Kensington to greet the pre-dawn arrivals. He is expecting to hold his position through the day. Burr Oak is about 55 miles further east past Smith Center, clear on the other side of the geographic centroid of the 48 contiguous states. He reports that the day dawned clear and dry with no discernible breeze in Kensington, but light winds out of the east-southeast are expected today. After getting to Kensington riders will hope that yesterday's winds out of the east that they had to fight might repeat as a tailwind today and tomorrow.

John Flanigan and Vernon Smith are riding together at the front and were last seen at the McDonalds in Norton re-filling their tanks at 6:30 AM. Chris Kaiser is on his own about an hour behind John and Vern. These three constituted the overnight Kensington arrivals. Henk Bouhuyzen, Albert Kong, Vickie Tyer and Todd LeBlanc all arrived in Kensington within 45 minutes of each other just after sunrise and are headed back. Sharon Stevens is in Kensington (as of 9:15 AM).

John Flanigan is a veteran of Cascade, Boston-Montreal-Boston and Paris-Brest-Paris, but is on the Last Chance route for the first time. Vernon Smith is one of 9 Last Chance veterans at this year's start having ridden LC in 2oo6, and is riding his second 1200-km of the year after being the 3rd finisher (with three others including Ken Bonner) at this year's Gold Rush Randonnee.

Sharon and Vickie are the riders from Texas that Paul Rozelle mentioned in one of his pre-start tweets. Vickie's daughter did the driving as they did the long drive from Dallas on Tuesday. While they said they didn't really get any sleep in the car they had no complaints. And it sure doesn't seem to be slowing them down.

Everyone else got out of Atwood at least an hour before the 5:57 AM control closing so all are in good shape time wise and were able to enjoy a second sunrise on the plains. Ron Selby made it a sub-5-hour overnight stop to help close the gap on the rest of the bunch. Ron is one of 14 riders at this year's start that have not previously completed a 1200.