Laundry Day

Today was a short ride at 30 miles and we were in Springfield before lunch. The first half of the ride was parallel to the interstate again after a couple days where we got away from it a bit. The second half was through some rolling hills north and east of Springfield. It was a bit of deja vu for me, as I had ridden this exact stretch of ride going the opposite direction last April. Tomorrow will be the same as well. As I scroll back through my pictures from last year, I can see it was exactly as boring as I have zero pictures from here other than a Rte 66 Roadside Park. Because we couldn't check into our hotel until later in the afternoon, we chose to kill time at Gideon's Laundry and then have lunch. That's about as mundane as you can get. Or so we thought. There are almost always interesting people hanging out at the laundromat. And I don't mean the kind of people that accidentally bump into each other while folding their unmentionables, fall in love, and have a movie made about their lives. No, I mean the waitress who can change a $20 bill when the laundromat attendant can't, because she just got off her shift and has a pocketful of small bills (and larger ones) from her tips. Or "Ed". I don't know if his real name is Ed because he never told us, but Ed is easy for me to spell so we'll just run with it. It's still unclear to me if "Ed" was actually doing any laundry. He was, however, quite chatty. He was in Vietnam so I'm guessing he was in his mid-70's. He also must have felt very bad for us, as word had clearly spread about the senior discount from last night. He told me - without prompting! - that he thought I was about 48. Dan's gray hair and beard put him at 51 or 52. In the time it took to do one wash load (30 minutes), we learned that "Ed" had been married - and divorced - 3 times. Twice he had the bad timing of walking in on his soon-to-be ex-spouses in flagrante delicto. Both of those women are now dead. Wife number 3 was bi-polar with seven different personalities. "Ed" is a process server and his area appears to cover most of the lower 48, or as much of it as one can reasonably get to by car in a day from Springfield. I was able to delicately extricate myself from the conversation by having to move my clothes to the dryer. When I came back to our little table, "Ed" had moved outside and was working on his car. When he saw me back at the table, he came in and giddily (?) showed me the ant killer ( I could buy at Dollar Tree) that he was using to clean his headlights. He then proceeded to clean the headlights for the waitress and the laundromat attendant as well.

One other laundromat side note. I had carefully saved one change of clothes so I could put the clothes I was riding in into the washing machine. I took the clothes into the restroom, only to discover that my boxers, which had been in my hand when I set off for the restroom, had not completed the journey. Make the quick decision to go "commando", I finished changing and stepped out of the restroom to find my polka-dotted boxer shorts on the floor outside the door. Not sure if anyone else had seen them lying there, I quickly picked them up and acted like they were just more dirty clothes for the washer.

Also, pumpkin had 3 "P"'s.

The offending bill from dinner last night

"Ed"

I'm just speechless. I nearly got myself hit by a couple cars as I realized what I had just seen and looped back around for the photo op.