Iowa to MINNESOTA!

After 3+ hours of running on Iowa's shoulder-less, no line-of-site, 60 mph-speed-limit county roads, we made an executive decision to live to run another day and bailed off the country roads and jump onto state highway 60. So, Kendall picked me up on county road K49, we spent the night in Le Mars, then I ran east a bit to a road that would take me north of Le Mars, to a road I could run west to Highway 60, and I've been on Highway 60 ever since.

It turned out to be a fine decision: four-lane divided highway thus plenty of room for cars to maneuver past me (and most drivers more than willing to do so), a double-wide shoulder (one width asphalt, one width runnable gravel) thus plenty of room for me to maneuver, and only a wee bit more traffic than on the county roads. Yayy! Just two downsides to Highway 60: a little trickier to find rendezvous points with Kendall & Paul and Hedwig (our newlyish named RV) and not possible to have a cyclist with me...so all solo running. Also about 7 miles from the end of the day today (after 50 miles of Highway 60), it went down to 2 lanes - but still with a good shoulder.

And speaking of the end of the day today: my final step of the day - 32 miles from the start of the day - was in MINNESOTA! What with the route change, I entered the state about 30 miles west of the originally-planned Minnesota entry point so I'll get some extra Minnesota miles - but a big chunk of the ~200 Minnesota miles will be on trail. I'm psyched!

Various numbers from the past couple of days:
- 4 dead skunks in one day (yesterday)
- 3 chicken trucks - feathers everywhere
- 3 cell phone carcasses
- 1 strand of silver beads
- 1 sheriff curious about what we were up to
- 1 toenail (from my left little toe) now deposited in the soil of Alton Iowa
- 1 trailer-full of a donkey baseball team
- and, as of 7 p.m. (ish) Central Time today, 645.5 trip miles!