Mile 3693.0 - The easiest day

On the morning of day 60, I got to see the segment about my trip that had aired on the local Fort Wayne news the night before. The text of the segment can be found here:

http://www.indianasnewscenter.com/home/97272464.html

I had spent about 8 minutes talking into the camera and a few more just talking to the reporter. It was pared down to a minute and the one quotation they used is not the one I would have ran with. But, I'm pleased whenever cycling makes the evening news and if it happens to be about me that's fine too.

I hung out with Ben, his stepson and infant daughter and their nanny long enough to get Chik-Fil-A with them. In retrospect, I probably should have gotten Jimmy Johns instead. Oh well. I ended up getting starting a little later than planned, but still early enough to get some serious miles in.

Ben lives just down the street from a golf course that Fort Wayne's River Greenway runs along. Apparently, they had just finished connecting the two long segments of it, and I was impressed. It was smooth and even, connected several parks and was being used. Cyclists, pedestrians with and without strollers and even a couple rollerbladers. I rode it all the way to the end, wishing it continued further. Monroesville? Decatur? You should consider it. Heck, you could follow the river all the way down to St. Marys, OH.

I swung north a few blocks then turned east again on Paulding St. Paulding is a big, important street for it's run through Fort Wayne. But then it crosses over US496 and it becomes less significant. Unpaved for a couple stretches even. I did hit my high speed of 27.1 coming down the 496 overpass. But the road is at least flat and straight without much traffic and I was enjoying a solid tailwind, so I kept up a constant speed around 19 mph on the paved portions. The wheat and corn fields suddenly gave way to a vast private collection of half buried pipes behind a barbed wire fence.

Curving a bit through this complex, I came suddenly to State Line Road. I pulled out my camera for the shot of the Welcome to Ohio sign. As I was lining it up, two cyclists came around the line of trees along the angle of Ohio 500 heading northeast towards Payne. The bikes were loaded, large panniers on front and back wheel under neon yellow rain covers and handlebar bags perched on the front. I held my ground in the entrance of the intersection (though out of the way of the couple cars that came along) and let them come to me. I found out that these were the lead cyclists from a group of 15 going from Maryland to Seattle. They were raising money for the UNC Lineburger Cancer Center and much of the group was 16 year old boys looking to become Eagle Scouts. Their website is www.Cycle20Ten.com and I suggest you check them out and support them if you can.

They were telling me that they were all riding the same model bike and everyone carrying different parts, so that if anything were to go awry on the road, they have the means to fix it. Other than the frame, they could basically assemble a full bike, which is kinda cool. But they confessed that maybe they should have chosen a better model as already they had had some mechanical issues. I bragged about how beastly Penny is. For a steel frame bike that was designed before I was born, she was comfortable and gives me very little trouble.

As I was talking with the front two, three more came around the corner. We talked for some time about the road ahead of them. I was impressed that they were going in such a large group, they were impressed that I was flying solo. Since they were only a couple weeks into it and I was a couple from the end, I told them what to expect from the states I had passed through as far as I could. As I write this from New York, they are just entering Minnesota. Good luck guys!

Standing there talking, the sun seemed to get hotter. They told me that I'd probably run into more of them as I got into Payne, and sure enough as I was coming out of a gas station with my 2 quarts of gatorade, four more of the group pulled up. We talked a few minutes and they complained about their headwind. Their headwind was my tailwind, and I wanted to get back into it before it decided to calm down.

I cruised along this land of straight lines and flat planes. Unlike the vast spaces between places in the west, the towns here are two to six miles apart, though really that's not a quite accurate picture. The towns were where the houses clumped closer together and there was a hardware shop/liquor store. But houses lined much of the road between the towns, and for a long while I felt like I was riding through the remaining farmland outside suburban Chicago. I had to remind myself that Bolingbrook was a couple hundred miles behind me, not three miles ahead.

I took a break at a closed down restaurant/ice cream parlor in Melrose. It at least offered me a bench out of the sun. I took the time to call my parents and tell them about my appearance on tv the night before. Getting up, I rode onward until Leipsic, where it was time for dinner. I came to the three block strip of downtown Leipsic and stopped to ask a larger, older man where in town to eat. 'Nowhere', he replied then pointed to the pizza place in front of us. 'But I'm going in here, it's the best of the lot'.

The pizza place was also a drive through liquor store. After I ordered I found my way to the bar in the back. The bartender had Pawn Stars on the tv and, after serving me, grabbed her dinner that had just come out of the oven and sat by me at the bar to eat. I told her about my trip and she talked about having owned her own pizza place for 12 years before walking away from it. Round turned into round, my pizza having appeared and disappeared, and soon the boys were coming in to watch wrestling on the big screen in the back. The bartender gave me advice on which road to pull down to camp, as that was my plan for the night. County road 5 was full of trucks, even throughout the night, but the next one down, county road 4 had only a few people living on it. Good to know.

The sun was starting to set, so I got back out onto highway 613. I stopped at the gas station at county road 5 to grab more water and gatorade for the morning. The cashier saw my helmet and asked how far I was going. Upon hearing about my trek, he asked if I was hungry and offered to make me a free sandwich. Sure, I'll take a free sandwich. Thanking him, I rode on to the next intersection, county road 4, and turned north along it. I went in maybe 2/3rds of a mile, passing two houses, but not yet coming to the next and I found the perfect spot.

There was a space where clearly two different fields lined up next to each other, though both were planted with corn. Across the street along the same line, a wheat and corn field met up. There was an unplanted gap that extended maybe 80 feet back into the rows of corn and was about 10 feet wide. The corn was tall enough to come over the top of the tent, so when it was pitched and the sun had set, there was no way that the few cars going along would see me. Even as I ate my free sandwich in the brightness of the full moon, I was hidden from the road.

Day 60, Fort Wayne, IN - Cornfield camp east of Leipsic, OH
72.3 miles in 4:21:18 for a total of 3693.0 in 282:45:31 and a top speed of 27.1 mph