Day 23, Tuesday, May 13: A questionable decision
The pre-dinner storm of the day before left us with a soggy camp. There is not much to do in that situation other than wipe down the rain fly as best you can, stuff the wet fly and tent in their bag, and hit the road. (After a cup of coffee, of course.)
I was feeling glum. I had not slept well, my legs were heavy, and we were not sure when we would find a decent breakfast. The day was about to get much worse.
We had a Warm Showers host lined up in Wood River, Illinois, about 50 miles away. I used Ride With GPS to create our route to his house during one of my sleepless spells in the middle of the night. I downloaded it to my Garmin bicycle computer without much thought.
Around mile 5, traveling along Bear Creek Lane, the Garmin suggested I make a left turn on "Road." The lesson we were about to learn is that when Garmin does not know the name of a road, you need to think twice about taking it.
I was not worried at the time, but I did take a picture because I thought it was amusing.
At the turn, "Road" appeared to be a driveway into a farm. There was a house on the right of the drive, and some outbuildings scattered around. John asked if I was sure. After some of the roads we had been on earlier in the trip, I was convinced it was fine. So we took the turn.
There we two men working beside the house. They didn't even stop to wave. I am convinced they were snickering to themselves knowing full well what we were getting ourselves into.
We rounded a couple of corners and went down a hill. It started to get muddy and I bogged down, my wheels sliding, and I had to put a foot down. So I started walking the bike.
As we rounded another turn I realized this was trouble. The road, if Garmin wants to call it that, flattened out in a small creek bottom. For maybe 25 yards on either side of the creek the road was just mud, several inches deep, with no way to go around.
I suppose we could have turned around at that point, and I expect John wanted to. But that would mean going back through a little mud past the two snickering farmers, and I was not about to do that. I would rather push my bike through a little bit more mud and not suffer that ignominy.
So we walked our bikes through the mud, across the creek, and through the mud on the other side. The wheels of our bikes were muddy, making them heavy and difficult to push even when we found a bit of solid ground.
I expected the mud to end, but we rounded another turn and realized the mud continued, but now uphill. O course it was uphill: we were in a creek bottom.
By now the tires were caked, with mud clogging the space between our tires and fenders. I initially tried keeping my bike in the weeds beside the road while I walked on the edge of the road, but it was too slippery. There was nothing to do but walk in the weeds and keep the bikes in the weeds too.
We pushed and pushed, sometimes having to move to the other side of the road. That was always difficult because the bikes were already covered in mud, and you had to cross now mud.
It seemed like miles, but was less than one, before the road was dry enough for us to mount our bikes and ride. Of course they made terrible grinding noises as the rolling tires cleared some of the mud from the fenders. My rim brakes were making strange noises, too, so I spent some time cleaning them as well as I could, then riding and tapping the brakes until I was convinced they would actually stop me if I needed them.
Later I looked more closely at the route and realized we could have stayed on paved roads through the town of Donnellson where we might have found a Casey's, or at least a hot cup of coffee.
We passed through a couple of towns but didn't find coffee until Sorento. Like all many towns we passed through in Indiana and Illinois, the restaurants were all permanently closed, the towns slowly dying. I would love to know why. The huge farms we rode by seen to be prospering. But I suspect it is all industrial farming that hires very few locals.
After 20 miles we reached New Douglas and the beginning of the Madison County Transit Nickel Plate Trail. We had ridden all the way from Cincinnati, across Indiana and most of Illinois, on roads, and we were looking forward to some trail riding.
A few miles down the trail a strange grinding noise was coming from John's front wheel. The crushed limestone from the trail was adhering to the mud under his fender. It became harder and harder to pedal.
We finally had to stop and John tried to clean out the fenders with a stick. It didn't work, so he ended up taking the wheel of so he could get to all the muck stuck in the fender.
We finally reached a large town, Edwardsville snow 40 miles into the day. At one point I got on the sidewalk and rounded a corner to check Google. When I was done, I looked back and John was nowhere to be seen. I was about to go back and see how bad the crash was when he came around the corner and said, with a hushed voice, "I just found a wallet with a bunch of cash."
It turned out to be $1400 and change.
We had lunch and tried to figure out how to get it back to the owner. Eventually we realized there was a credit card from a bank on the corner where he found the wallet. So John took it there, and the teller he spoke to said the owner had been looking for it. John left it there and I'm about 97% confident the teller was honest and returned it.
From Edwardsville we had a short ride to our Warm Showers hosts in Wood River, Dave and Cindi. Dave is a brewer and treated us to his Cucumber Kölsch. We showered, cleaned our bikes, started laundry, and took our hosts to dinner.
It was a strange day. It should have been an easy 50 mile ride, but I turned it into a bit of an epic with my navigation. But we reached out destination for the day with a minimal amount of wear and tear, and we had a great time visiting Dave and Cindi.
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