Route Notes

We left the Adventure Cycling Northern Tier Route once we left Ashkum, IL, and are once again winging it. Riding by the seat of our pants, as it were. We're heading southwest toward St. Louis, and spent the last 2 days on Rt. 45 and 54 in Illinois. There are a number of small towns along this route, including a little hamlet called "Cornland". At lunch in Mt. Pulaski, we even met a Cornland resident. Retired farmer, now spends his days playing gin rummy for cash which he then spends at local flea markets.

Rt 54 follows the railroad line, and we've seen both an Amtrak passenger train headed north and a very, very, very long freight train headed south. It's fun to be able to ride so close to the train. The size of it, the noise it makes on the tracks, and the whistle that blows at towns and crossings are all part of the fun.

Also on Rt. 54 are huge grain silos. We've been seeing these silos at large farms, and for many small towns, they're the only game going. We read in Friday's morning paper that a man had nearly lost his life in a grain silo on Rt. 54. We had passed that grain silo earlier in the day! We both knew that something different was happening at the silo--there was a crew trying to load a binful of corn into a silo. Even though neither of us know exactly how to load corn into a silo, the operation we saw seemed really sub-optimal. And besides, corn pieces and corn dust were being spit on us as we road by. After we read the newspaper account of the accident, we realized that they were trying to get the corn back into the silo that they'd had to remove in order to save the man's life. I think the only question here is exactly what bet this guy lost.

We're (read: Matthew) getting pretty good at improvising routes these days. Seems like since the first day of our trip we've been explaining to folks that while we're on a cross-country bicycle tour, we're not just going from one coast to the other. At first, people would gently point west and tell us that if we're heading to the Oregon coast, we're heading in the wrong direction. But now, after 13 weeks and 3400 miles, it's harder to explain how we're still just in central Illinois. So we've begun calling our trip "The Scenic Detour", and I think it's going to catch on. We even have a mascot now. Yesterday, Matthew saw a beanie babie escaping from a plain white car, just outside of Springfield. When we passed by a few minutes later, it was obvious that his "captors" hadn't noticed his escape, so we snatched him up. We've agreed to keep his identity secret so he could join the trip as our new mascot--"Detour the Duck".

One last note about cross-country tours. The couple that we met just past the Fly-by-Night Cookie Company in Fairhaven, NY, sent us an update of their trip. Loree and Chris are making a cross-country bicycle trip from Maine to Astoria. They are forging their own way from the Northern Tier to the TransAmerica Route. Loree's note said that they're in Missouri now, a day or two outside of Kansas. She mentioned that they've been in quite a bit of rain, which is unfortunate since they are also behind their schedule. They are due to fly back to their home in England on September 13, and are hoping to have a few days to spend with Loree's family in Idaho. Judging from the weather report we saw last night, I think that things will be a lot drier for them for the next week or so. Well, the humidity may feel like rain, but temps in the upper 90's should brighten things up a bit.

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for tonight's blog--we're already giggling about it.