Know what the midwest is young and restless

dear people looking at our website,
we are in the midwest. licking, Missouri to be exact and i recently got a new wheel. my rear wheel had begun to crack and the spokes were pulling out. so 120 dollars later i know am riding much smoother. last night we were in a town called Salem and after asking the fire station if we could camp around back they said yes. part of the reason for so much confusion (which will follow) is that once again we are off route armed only with a missouri state map we have decided that we can do a better job than the people who created the route everyone else takes. so anyways we set up camp behind the fire station and about an hour later after we had gone and eaten pizza we come back and set up our tarp. as we are setting up two fireman come up and say, whats going on? and i say we're camping like we said. problem is that the guy we talked to earlier looks exactly like this guy who has no clue who we are. but i didn't realize this at the time so i am trying to explain to this guy who i think is the guy i talked to earlier that we talked to him earlier and he said that we could camp. i thought he just hadn't understood earlier. then he asked me if i talked with the cheif as if i had a clue who that was. finally completely confused he leaves saying he will ask around and try to find out who we talked to because i don't think he believes that we actually talked to anyone. so nothing happens for a while. then at 11:20pm (which was a very late night) i go to bed. at 11:54 or so we wake up to 2 sets of headlights shining directly into our tarp. the cops had come to set things straight and had decided midnight was just as good a time as any. so half asleep we try to explain what the crap we are biking across the country for and i hand one of the policeman an amani brochure. they take both of our ID's and call us in to make sure we aren't wanted or anything. as he is calling us in the officer who is calling us in says "last name dunlap first name benjamin" so i shout" peter". finally they give us our ID's back and there is a brief moment where we can tell they really want us to leave but they also see in us an immovableness that comes with being woken up at midnight after biking 70 miles the day before. so we stayed and they finally left.
Cruizin',
Pete Dunlap