Dodging thunderstorms

(brice writing)

It’s hard to predict whether Susan or I will be more cautious about something. She thought paragliding off the cliffs of Lima, Peru would be a great idea (I was horrified) and is happy to make up a recipe as she goes (where I like to compare 4 different epicurious recipes for the same thing and average them). Today, however, after I dismissed the thunder rumbling in the distance and dark clouds ahead, she insisted we duck under a handy church porch. A few minutes later, this happened:

We repeated the conversation a couple of hours later at a gas station. I was confident that we could bike north at just the right speed and stay between bands of storms, while Susan strongly suggested we wait 15 minutes and see what happened. Ten minutes later there was another bout of impressive lightening and rain. We stayed reasonably dry under the gas station awning, though Susan picked a terrible place to stand when the gutters overflowed and got pretty drenched.

A few miles down the road after that storm passed, this happened to my back tire:

I guess it’s not reasonable to expect kevlar tires to protect against broken off screws. We were going down a hill fairly quickly at the time and I was happy to get the bike stopped upright.

Unfortunately the two storm delays and the flat stopped us well short of Crawfordsville. We managed about 50 miles to Greencastle, still fairly respectable. We could have gone farther but there are no lodging options between here and Crawfordsville. There are regular towns between Crawfordsville and Urbana, so tomorrow we’ll just get an early start and see how far we can get. We’ll gain an hour if we make it to Illinois, but of course that won’t actually make the sun set any later.