Days 4-6. Holy cow.

Hey there. Wow. I camped the last 2 nights, which is why I haven't posted until now. Tonight I'm staying at the "Althoff Motel" on the far outskirts of Quincy Illinois.

Did I say I wouldn't talk about the heat anymore? Today I cut it a little too close, and misjudged how much water I would need. Quincy is about 20 miles from the previous town on the route, and I figured 3 liters should be sufficient. Apparently not, because when I was still 12 miles out I was over half done with my last liter. Luckily there was a small town with a gas station about 3 miles off route, which I arrived at with about a cup of water to spare.

As is becoming typical, the morning was wonderful. I woke up around 2am and couldn't get back to sleep (possibly because of the freight trains passing next to the park, or possibly because I was edgy). So I packed up and was on the road by 3:30am. Those 2 hours of riding in the dark were magical. Cool, quiet, hardly any traffic. The only downside being of course that there was no scenery. Just the sounds of nighttime insects, birds, and the occasional dog.

Just as the sun was rising I found myself in Nauvoo looking up at a magnificent Mormon temple. There was a lone Mormon there in front of it, and we ended up talking for about an hour about Joseph Smith, atheism, etc. Turns out Nauvoo was the town where Joseph Smith was killed by a bunch of angry townspeople. I asked what the townspeople were so angry about, and he said they "didn't like his message." Heh. Maybe that and his polygamy? Yeah, he admitted that that might have been a small factor as well.

At one point I asked him why Mormons have so many children. He said there are all these unborn souls waiting to be born and the living Mormons want to do them the favor of allowing them to be born and live on Earth. Of course I asked what about overpopulation of the earth, and he said "no such thing." Hmm. He said it's just that people are not taking good care of the planet and that is why people are starving in Africa, etc. OK. I tried to pursue with him the idea that the exponential growth of the Mormon population was not sustainable - I said after enough time all the land surface would be covered entirely with people all jammed together, and how would they eat, etc? His reply only clicked with me later... he said essentially that it wouldn't get to that point because there would always be some evil people who kill people... so in essence, he's saying that at some point the population would stabilize because evil people would be killing (on average) 8 of the 10 kids that each Mormon family was having. That sounds pretty miserable. Too bad I didn't think it through to that point during our conversation. :)

I have a few pics and other stories from the past few days which I'll post later.

Day 3: fog, heat, and poshness

The morning was foggy and cool. The sunrise was neat through the fog.

It didn't last too long though. Soon again it was blazing hot. Perhaps I can stop talking about the heat and just take it as read. OK.

When I got to Henry, IL I stopped at a friendly coffeeshop and drank an iced "german chocolate cake" coffee drink, and enjoyed the air conditioning.

Today I noticed that I've been averaging about 60 miles per day, and that even that has been tough. So I re-figured how long my trip to Denver might take based on all 60-mile days and including one day per week of rest. This added two weeks over my previous estimate with 100-mile days and no rest breaks. What was I thinking? Anyway, now I'm thinking I can be in Denver by August 26. Hopefully I'll speed up as my body gets stronger and I learn more about touring, and I'll have more time to hang out with friends in Denver.

Today I spent a lot of time riding through fields of corn and soybeans. In fact I think those are the only commercial crops I've seen so far. Apparently they need massive tractors to deal with this stuff. Here's one example.

So after last night's very small amount of uncomfortable sleep, I decided to get a hotel room tonight. One place listed on the Adventure Cycling map for Kewanee was "Aunt Suzy's Bed and Breakfast". Who can pass up a name like that? They put me in the "Victorian" suite. Not shown in the photo is the red velvet chaise lounge with a peacock-feather fan sitting on it. Wow, they thought of everything!

Day 2: rain, heat, and fear

When I got up Wednesday morning it was raining lightly. It didn't take long to get to the I&M canal trail, and as I rode along between the abandoned waterway and forest I was overcome with joy. The rain stayed light and cleared up after about an hour. There were many egrets and herons on the water, countless turtles, some kind of swimming brown furry mammal (possibly not a beaver), and deer. The first photo shows a nice part of the canal.

By mid-day, no trace of the rain remained and the sun was brutal. The canal trail was not too bad, because there were shade trees some of the time. Even so, the heat and humidity made for a tough ride.

As evening approached, it became clear that I was not in shape to get to the campground I had optimistically signed up for earlier in the day. I had written some weak notes regarding the location of some alternate camping area (I thought) that was closer, based on some web surfing the previous evening. I ended up low on drinking water on a dirt road following the Illinois River. I knocked on someone's door with my hands full of empty water bottles, and the kind man inside filled them for me, gave me some snack food, and told me that the only nature area around was back there and up that nasty hill - but that it wasn't a campground. He said I would probably be OK to camp there anyway because hardly anyone went there this time of year because of the mosquitos (hmm) and no mushrooms were in season. So, I pushed my bike up the nasty hill and found the nature preserve. He'd advised me that I should camp out of sight of the road (just in case), so I found a flat spot in the forest away from the road and set up camp. I have very limited solo-camping experience, and it turns out I get freaked out really easily by animal noises in the night when I'm all by myself. At one point around 2am after I had finally gotten to sleep, I was awoken suddenly by a couple loud huff!s of breath and two loud stomp!s on the ground. I was tingling with fear, but I didn't hear any more... I figure it must have been a deer sniffing and then jumping away from right next to my tent. There were many other noises - coyotes, dogs, car engines, and random shufflings on the ground. I don't know if I even got 4 hours of sleep, and around 4:30am the sky was ever-so-slightly lighter than before, so I started to get up. I was on the road just after 6am.

First day out, arrived in Joliet, IL

The requisite "before" picture.

Well, I got a late start (1:10pm!) but I did leave today. I arrived in Joliet just as the sun was going down. The odometer says 64.9 miles, though I don't know how accurate it is since I didn't actually measure the circumference of the front wheel when I installed the odometer, I just chose one of the options that seemed close.

Today's ride demonstrated to me why I love Chicago and I hate suburban development. In chicago there are great bike lanes, coffee shops, restaurants, funky stores, interesting people, and it's all close and easily accessible. In between Chicago and Joliet there are industrial-scale meat processing companies (Quantum Foods!), there are eNORmous chain retail stores, and roads with no shoulder and 50mph traffic. I kept thinking "This is what cheap gas gives us." Everything is so far apart you have to drive a car. The scene in this second photo here almost made me cry... it is going to be an enormous new commercial development. On the right behind the sign advertising it you can see a beautiful field and forest, with a gorgeous sunset to boot (though it didn't come out well in the photo, sorry). On the left you can see a tiny corner of the acres and acres of bare dirt that they've scraped clean in preparation. Yuck. The thing that really gets me about it is that it isn't even close to anything. There are open fields and farms on either side of it. It's not even growing out from a town.

So of course I was relieved to finally get into Joliet and get onto the Joliet Junction Trail, pictured here. It is supposed to connect up with the Illinois & Michigan canal state trail which takes me another 60 miles or so west. There's supposed to be camping available along the canal trail, so I may not be blogging tomorrow night.

I hope you are all well. Good night.

First Post

I'm still not sure when I'll be starting, but I hope sometime next week. I have some more stuff to prepare, have to figure out the route, etc. I'm getting pretty psyched.

For those of you who haven't heard of Breen Colorado, it is the closest town I could find to where my friends Bob and Cathy are getting married. It's in the mountains near Durango. Should be a really pretty area to ride in, though tiring. :)