Wednesday, June 10: Rained like heck last nigh, and then again this morning - WELL into the morning, so much that we had to delay our departure and just kind of sit it out. I became a “dopler weather groupie” for a good hour as I just updated kept refreshing the radar map every 10 minutes trying to see if it was even worth going out today. Must have been three thunder storms that moved through our area in North Judson from 7 AM until 10 AM. And funny thing was that this string of storms was about 30-50 miles long and about 20 miles wide and totally moving west to east in our direction. The rest of the state was totally clear. My first inclination before I pulled out the doppler weather map card was to just bag the day and re-up with the motel and just work for the day. But when I saw that this thing was very localized I though it may be good to sit and wait for a window. 

That window arrived right around 10:15 AM. We were totally packed so we just left the key by the tv and left straight away to the trailhead where I had finished yesterday. Took like 5 minutes to get there and then I was on the bike and rolling at 10:30 AM CST - we have picked up an hour since yesterday. So as I mentioned yesterday, with all the rain, my plan to paddle the Kankakee River was out the door. Sad part of that is that I’d been waiting for this paddle for 4 months, really looking forward to loading that foldable bike on board and doing this major 50+ mile paddle west into Illinois. The Kankakee is supposed to be a really famous river to paddle in these parts and it’s kind of one of those wild and protected river systems. 

The fellow in the room next to us last night, saw my canoe on top of the van this morning, and after I told him what I’d wanted to do, he that he had a service call out near the Kankakee yesterday, and the road was flooded over. Not only that, but he said there was just a ton of debris floating down the river and clogging up some of the RR and road overpasses causing even more flooding. Guess I was about a week too late for the river paddle idea. But as I’v mentioned in prior blogs, some of my segments and/or days entail 2-3 options for just that reason. This because I remember Xing the country back in 2011 and while riding on the Katy Trail in MO, there were severe flooding problems on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. So I kind of knew not to put all my eggs in one basket when I had paddling involved. 

With that said, today was option #2: berm and grave road riding. So we got it going with Judy doing the support by driving ahead of me with the laundry list of roads I’d be riding on and then directing me through the maze of turns we had in store. This is the list of roads we did (mostly for my clarification on the final itinerary): 

400W out of town, then L onto 500S, to dead end, to L on 1200W which turns into 600E, to R on 1350N, to R on 250E, to L on 1450N, to R on 180E, to L on 1500N, Xing Rt 49, to L on 100W, to R on 1300N, to L on 550W, to R on Rt 231 which turns into 15th St and then turns into 1200N, to L on 600E Xing I-65 onto 1200N again. 

Yea, that’s what I did. And this is an easy list of the road itinerary compared to what I have in store for me in KS. So anyway, what I tried to do was parallel this old feeder RR line that goes west to east for about 50 miles. The reason for this is to have that 3rd option for this segment. But the berm was just too good today that I didn’t even need to go to that feeder RR line card. Probably about one-third of the roads I listed above were gravel, and let me tell you, it felt sooooooo good to actually have more and more gravel roads on the radar now that I’m getting further west. Some of those roads listed above were just about turning to gravel in that the asphalt was just all that was left on the road down the middle. And then some of the roads were total asphalt but had some pretty good fine gravel or earthen berm. So I never had anything that I’d call insidious to ride on, or that gave me fits to try to balance on. 

So the riding today was TAME compared to the stuff I did yesterday. And I think this will be the trend now from Illinois westward. That last stretch from Monterey to North Judson, that could likely have been my last true grunt through gnarly topography. Now the weather today was the hottest and most humid to date. I mean it was just bloody smoking hot and humid. Temps went to near 90 degrees with 99% humidity. Luckily I had this 8 mph headwind out of the west that was like a fan blowing on me at all times. Judy even remarked at how much of a bummer it was that I had that headwind in my face all day, but I told her it actually felt good, and help to cool me off. The only time it really affected my riding was when I was riding a purely gravel section and doing over 12 mph, then the headwind was very challenging. But on the berminator sections where I was doing 7-9 mph, the headwind was just refreshing, and really didn’t affect my speed or effort. 

I had three actual support stops where I knocked down some Powerades, cokes, water, yogurt, and/or sandwiches. That strategy of taking in the 20 oz of electrolytes and coke/water every 1.5 hrs in addition to food really helped to keep me from getting the heat bonk and heat exhaustion. By the time we got done we had Xed I-65, and were about 8 miles from the IL/IN border. Could have probably have done it but with the temps, Judy was massively uncomfortable, and we had experienced another one of those incidents where I got out of sight from her, and she was just wigged from that. 

I rode with no pack today (and thus no cell phone), and had her just go up the road a piece at a time, this so I wouldn’t have the pack causing me to sweat my arse off even more than usual. Well, She did a wrong turn and I went straight on that “Rt 231 which turns into 15th St and then turns into 1200N” section. I rode miles down the road expecting to see her coming up behind me. But that never happened. So I rode back east up the road on the asphalt to see if maybe she was at that last intersection in Demotte where I last saw her. Just before I got there she came down the road west towards me. I loaded the bike in the van to have her take me back to where I left off and was lectured for that several miles on how I should have waited for her when I saw her go the other way at the intersection - this despite the fact that I never saw her parked on the wrong side of the intersection looking for me. Now I’m not going to go through all the details, but again, within that short conversation we came to the conclusion once more “Pete is an A-hole”. 

I think the heat, the humidity, the anxiety of both of us for that short 30 min of not knowing where the other was, that kind of put the a period on any more progress for the day. So we bagged it right smack dab at the Xing of I-65 and then got on the freeway north and got a Super 8 motel. And wouldn’t you know it we got a room, opened the door and the room was dirty. So Judy called and nicely asked the manager for a clean room. Then this old hag of a rude ass maid brought up a key for another room and really just handed it to us as if we were pains in the asses. Then we opened that room and it had no chair, no fridge, no microwave. So she called to see if we could get a chair for this chairless desk that was in the room. A different lady, the manager, told her there were no chairs available. That’s when I got pissed. I normally don’t make many waves - but NO GD CHAIR IN THE ROOM WHERE THERE’S A DESK?  I mean WTF?????? So I got out of the shower, dried off and went down to talk to the manager. Did a fair bit of loud, demonstrative talking to this chick at the desk as an elderly gentleman was checking in. The poor old guy looked bewildered as I was ranting on. She asked me to please wait till she checked in the elderly gentleman and she’d work something else out with me. 

Now the amazing part of all of this is that the chick was just totally unapologetic as I went through the whole list of their F-ups since we’d gotten there. And when I told her she didn’t even appear to give a shit whether we were going to be happy customers or alienated customers, she just stood there stone-faced. With that she gave us another room….WITH a chair - yea can you believe it, a chair in a room that has a desk - and a fridge and microwave in there to. Now we could have moved out and gone to the Comfort Inn next door, but I just wanted to relax and not go through the whole check-in process again. 

Anyway, THAT was the drama for the day - not American Dirt!