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.