Macksville, KS to Dodge City, KS — 62.6 mi, 957 ft
Have you ever woken up to the feeling of your entire body itching from the very top of your head to your smallest toe? Well that’s how we all woke up this morning—everybody except Tatiana because mosquitoes don’t like her.
Last night our team went to a local park to celebrate July 4th. We ate from a Mexican food truck and played a little bit too intense game of ultimate frisbee. Our team is very competitive. Unfortunately, despite drenching ourselves in bug spray and then also using a kind stranger’s entire second can of bug spray, the bugs still got to us. Here’s a rough estimate of how many mosquito bites everyone on the team has now. Nunu: 25, Caroline: at least 30, Drew: 20-25, Aarushi: 20, Tatiana: 0, Nate: like 10000000000000.
So, we all slowly got ready and complained about our aches, sores, and itches more so than usual this morning. Also for some reason, we decided to spread out across different rooms of the church basement to try and hide from the sounds of the fireworks that had gone on past our bedtime the night before.
We had our alarms set for 8 and almost everyone was out of bed by 8:30ish but we had to be completely out of the church by 9:30 because Pastor Russell was hosting a breakfast then and guests would be arriving. We rushed to clean our mess and were done by 9:28.
We then shared an amazing breakfast with the Macksville Christian Church community full of so many fruits, pastries, and the fluffiest biscuits and gravy. We stuffed ourselves and I of course went back for seconds. Drew then serenaded everyone with some piano and we said our goodbyes around 11.
Recently, our group has all been biking together in a sort of blob which ebbs and flows, stretching close and then far apart. We’ve also been biking on highway 50 for the past two days so even if I’m a couple miles ahead or behind, I can see the rest of my team because we’re literally biking in a straight, flat line for the entire 80 mile day.
Our first rest stop was at the same park that we had gone to the night before to watch fireworks. Aarushi, our driver for the day, sarcastically exclaimed, “doesn’t this look familiar?” Me, not catching the sarcasm, moments later told everyone, “wow it’s the same park we were at last night!” Everyone on the team seems to think that I do this a lot and don’t pay attention to what people are saying but I genuinely just believed that Aarushi thought the park looked familiar…
Anyway, we continued our ride and made it to THE HALFWAY POINT OF THE US!? Or so we thought. It actually was not the geographic center, just the center between New York and San Francisco—which is still pretty cool. It’s crazy to think that we are basically halfway through our trip both in terms of distance and timeline. When I think about it too much I feel sad because I don’t want this summer to end. Our first bike day feels like so long ago yet also like time has just flown by.
We also stopped by the museum associated with this halfway point which had a bunch of old furniture, technology, and clothes. Most interesting to our team was this old bike that someone had ridden basically the same distance as us thus far. The only difference was that it was a single gear, no brakes, bare bones road bike—something we all agreed would be impossible for us to have done.
As we kept biking, we began to see hundreds and hundreds of… windmills! Not only that but they were facing us. This can only mean one thing… tailwinds!!!!!! We later found out that in this county alone they have 700 windmills.
We continued biking suspiciously faster than usual until we made it to our third and final rest stop of the day, a pool! But, unfortunately it was closed. Instead, Tatiana and Nate decided to jump through the sprinklers that had gone off across the lawn. Here’s when I noticed Nate’s back covered entirely with mosquito bites.
We then sat and ate our usual overpacked sandwiches as well as more snacks than you could ever comprehend. I chose this moment to take inventory of everything we’d finished eating after Tatiana and I had just gone grocery shopping the day before.
- 30 pack of capri sun
- 11 oz box of nilla wafers
- 90 slices of pepperoni
- 3.5 lbs of grapefruit
- 2.25 lbs of gummy worms
- 24 pack of gogo squeeze
- 2 trays of watermelon
- And probably much more
We had an extremely long lunch break, I think starting from 4PM and ending at 6PM. The more we sat, the more I ate. We also realized that our biking to rest time ratio for today was becoming a whopping 1:2. Just extreme bums eating extreme amounts. Eventually, we decided to depart on our last leg to our hosts, Lindy and Warren’s house. Because we’d eaten such a late lunch, we decided to switch up the order of our usual night routine of dinner first. Everyone showered first. Then while some people blogged, Drew and I went outside to pump tires and oil chains. This took maybe 30 minutes and within that time I think I got bitten at least 10 more times by mosquitoes. I came inside with a mosquito bite on my forehead and on my cheek!
We sat down for dinner around 9PM and had some amazing lasagna and iced tea! Lindy and Warren told us all about the history of Dodge City and why it’s called the “Wickedest Little City in America.”
We ended the night by doing a popcorn reading of Nate’s blog. As a team we also love when a new blog is posted and enjoy laughing at them together. We also know that we’ve been behind and we really appreciate all of our friends and family that keep up with them despite that.
Goodnight from three nights in the future,
Nunu
MIT Spokes 2026 
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