day30 65mi 4:52 escalante,UT

Took a shower this morning because I felt like it and was waiting for the grocery store to open. Bought some food and rolled out. Entered bryce national park and saw a bunch of french bikers touring the U.S. One of them was wearing a stars and stripes bandana which I thought was ironic. Thought he would be rocking the red,white and blue french stripes. The scenery was amazing. There is a bike/pedestrian path along the road for about 4-6 miles and I met a mountain biker named heather from Canada. Took a lot of photos because the scenery is so pretty. Today was hot. I was baking. Crested a summit and took a corner going 50m.p.h. in a tuck. The climb before escalante seemed to take forever. I got some encouragement from a group of bikers thumbs up, waves and one actually started clapping. Lots of people have been doing tha, but that was the first group of bikers who all did something and I have never gotten anyone to clap for me. The final push before the summit was like 12% for a couple of hundred yards. I was crawling going 3m.p.h. and had spittle dangling off my chin. It was hard toswallow my throat was so dry and I was scared to take a drink for fear of falling over. I stopped at the summit and sat down by a restroom in some shade and drank water and made myself a snack. I got up to leave after about 5 minutes and 3 guys were there. One of them started talking to me and it turns out they were staying at a B&B and had one of their buddies cancel. They invited me to stay the night and gave me directions. I tooka wrong turn and crossed a stream and pushed my bike up a sandy hill before I realized my mistake and turned around. Found the B&B and got a nice hot shower. We went into town and me and another guy split a pizza. Got back and had trouble falling asleep for some reason, It might have been the 2 cokes at dinner.