Susan and Brice's Bike Blog

Clipping wet clothes onto panniers is an effective and Earth-friendly way to dry them! (just make sure they don’t dangle down in the chain because then they will get very greasy :( )

Pretty Indiana fields:

(Susan here)

I know just about everyone in the world is sick of us talking endlessly about headwinds and tailwinds, but the degree to which they make a difference is huge. Riding in the car with Rachel in Bloomington, it was amazing to think, OK, I have no idea which way the wind is blowing right now and neither do these other drivers and it really doesn’t matter.

Today was a great illustration of the importance of winds, because they were out of the SW all day–because we rode north and then turned to the west, we got to experience both a headwind and a tailwind on the same day. From an average of 14 mph, we dropped to something that approached 5 for huge stretches of time in between Crawfordsville and Perrysville, IN, when the winds were the strongest in our face. It was really awful. We were in the saddle for about 7 hours, the longest we’ve spent since traveling from Pittsburgh to Wheeling. It was also probably our most physically exhausting day since then, too. But–at least it wasn’t raining and there was no danger of hypothermia, although it did stray a bit too far in the other direction, thermia-wise. Our sweet bikers’ tans are developing impressively.

So our plan for completing a century and getting to Urbana did not quite pan out. Instead, we’re stuck in Danville, IL tonight, a city that, to say the least, has seen better days.

On the way into town, we were waiting at a stoplight when a dude in a pickup truck leaned out the window and asked us about our trip. As everyone has been, he was really friendly and enthusiastic, but then he ended the conversation at the green light like this:

“Welcome to Danville! You’d better get out as fast as you can. There ain’t nothin’ here!”

He was right. For a city of its physical size, Danville actually contains what seems like nearly no commercial activity and very few occupied residential buildings. All the demolished stretches of downtown give it a rather post-apocalyptic air; I was happy that we could finish dinner in time to make it back to the motel before dark.

Tomorrow morning we’re getting up super early and hitting the road towards the west, which should bring us to our friends’ Su and Martin’s house in Urbana well before lunch. I’ve been friends with Su since the first day of 6th grade. She’s nine months pregnant with her second child and I’m really happy that we’ve made such good time that we’re actually hitting Urbana a couple weeks before her due date. The winds will be strong all morning, but out of the south. Hopefully we can average at least 12 on this nice flat terrain.

(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.

We’ve had a great time in Bloomington resting up and are getting ready to head back out. We walked around UI a bit, got our bikes tuned up, had a nice lunch with Susan’s cousin Chris, visited the Upland Brewery, toured Rachel’s church, and played with the poodle.

Some answers to questions:
-We’ve biked just shy of 800 miles so far
-Tomorrow we are planning to bike to Crawfordsville, IN and then Champaign Urbana the next day. Both legs are ~75 miles, so they will be very long days, but the route is mostly flat and the winds look favorable so we’re giving it a shot. After Urbana, we’ll probably take a short jaunt to Monticello IL and then head north to St. Charles, exact route TBD.
-Thunderstorms are tricky; we don’t really want to be out in the open during lightening or on the road during strong downpours. But in the midwest, if we only rode on days with no chance of storms, we’d never ride. So we’re keeping as close an eye on approaching storms as possible using the phone and we’ll hope we can find a porch or something else to be under for anything strong. Normal rain, of course, we’ll keep riding through.
-Brian: no primates yet, we thought we might have seen them on the horizon a couple of times but they never fully materialized.

Tallie isn’t a Muppet but she plays one on tv.

(brice writing)

After spending a fair amount of time being barked at/chased by various dogs over the past two weeks, we’ve enjoyed hanging out with friendly dogs the last two days. Last night, our great hosts Dan and Tammie had two sweet golden retrievers who could barely contain their excitement at meeting new people. Dan and his friend Troy are going to be touring up the east coast this summer; we hope they have as wonderful of hosts on their trip as we’ve had on ours.

We woke up this morning to a thunderstorm and ominous weather reports, but we bided our time until the last front showing up on weather radar moved through and headed out around 11. There was still a bit of a drizzle, but temperatures were warm enough to make our short 40 mile ride comfortable.

We made it to our next Official Destination of Bloomington, IN, where we will be taking a couple of rest days and visiting our good friend Rachel (Rachel was Susan’s college roommate and also officiated our wedding). Rachel has an awesome poodle who we are looking forward to chillaxing with during our downtime. Bloomington is home to Indiana University so has a lot going on; Rachel says that there’s a wider diversity of cuisine available here than in Indianapolis.

We don’t have big plans for the off days other than resting up, working out our remaining knee issues (which are thankfully dwindling) and finding a good bike shop to get a few items tuned up. Both our derailleurs are mis-shifting a bit and Susan’s rear wheel is out of true and was rubbing against the brake. I’ve worked out both problems on my own before but without a bike stand and a lot of patience they’re probably best left to the pros.

So that’s the news from here. Anything people are interested in hearing more or less about? Gear questions? Logistics? The weather? Road kill reports? Leave a comment.

Stats:
Mileage: Only about 46 miles
Hours: Too many.
MPH: Potentially below 10. Embarrassing.
Best diner breakfast so far: The Breakfast Club in Lebanon, OH. Check it out. Hollandaise sauce!
Grossest road shoulder litter so far:
Several hypodermic needles in a bed of broken glass, on the south-bound ramp to OH-4 from OH-63. I’ll take the flattened possums any day. Hooray for Kevlar tire liners.

We stopped along a grassy stretch along the road outside of Lebanon to stretch and to look at the cows that were parked pretty close to the roadside. Some of them stood up when we stopped nearby and one particularly curious gal came over to say “hi”:

Then she decided she wanted to take a munch on my pannier. She nommed on the strap and then started going at it a little more aggressively so I had to move the bike before she chewed a hole in it:

Then a man drove up in a car and informed us that we were on the property of the Ohio State Correctional Institution at Lebanon and would we kindly move along.

Anyway, Indiana looks a lot like Ohio so far. One potentially different thing is that Indiana is forecast to actually provide us with
TAILWINDS
tomorrow, if you can believe it, which Ohio never really got around to doing, although it did stop blowing strong headwinds at us for a day or two, which was nice I guess. Indiana, this may be the start of a beautiful friendship.