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And we’re off…
We got up early in the morning to see Curtis and Sarah off and say goodbye for the 3 to 4 weeks will be gone. It was raining when we got up so we finished cleaning out the car and leaving behind things we didn’t need on the tour and loading and lubing the bikes.
The rain finally abated and we rode with Elam to his grandparents house. We had met them last year and said hello and good-byes to them them and headed out on the bikes. Goshen has a very nice bike network and it took us us to the edge of town where we unfortunately had to wait for a train. The train wasn’t moving at all, so I looked up a quick 1 mile detour to a bridge over the tracks and we got on our way again.
The rest of the day was spent riding down flat and quiet Indiana roads through farm fields full of corn and soy. The only traffic we encountered was in the suburbs of South Bend & Laporte and it was short-lived.
While the majority of the ride was uneventful, the end was not. The tent and ground sheet had popped off my bike at a rough railroad crossing. Didn’t hear or see that it was gone. Ahead on the road, a woman stopped Dana to ask if we had lost a bag. She hadn’t, but as I pulled up I looked back to find the tent missing. I started to head the 1/2 mile back to the tracks, but a nice young man who had passed us going the other way saw the bag and sheet and picked it up and was heading back to return it to us. Road Angel #2, and while he was waiting for me to get everything reattached (more securely this time!), another couple stopped to ask if everything was OK and if I needed any help. People are nice — don’t forget that when you’re watching the news designed to make you angry at everyone (except the people you should be angry at — the ones stealing your and your children’s’ futures).
I had mistakenly routed us to the group camping area rather than the main campground. But even before we got that far, we were routed on a bike path paralleling US 12, the “Calumet Trail.” Dana pointed to a sign that said “Nat’l Park Campground” on US 12, but why ride a busy road when there’s a bike trail available. We soon found out why. While the trail’s first hundred yards or so were nice, packed “double track” (MTBer’s way of saying a gravel road with two wheel tracks), we were soon riding through giant puddles up to our chains. That meant wet feet and at one point I lost control and fell. Nothing serious though: a bruise or two, and a little sand on the bike, but otherwise fine. As we found out later, we were about 1/8 mile from our campground — IF we had turned left.
The route led us through neighborhoods full of very fancy houses, but then dumped us at an uncleared and blocked-off trail, with plenty of biting flies and mosquitoes. I rerouted us around that and we got to the shore of Lake Michigan and the wrong campground where I finally realized my mistake. The detour did, however, lead us past a group of homes that were built as part of the Chicago World’s Fair, and if we hadn’t gone off track, we wouldn’t have seen the lake. All-in-all, we added about 2 miles and finished the day with 72. We set up our campsite,slathered ourselves with bug spray and extra clothes, showered, reapplied bug spray, made dinner, and crawled into the tent at 8:30 to get away from the darn mosquitoes. Thunderstorms were coming, too, so we battened down all the hatches and fell to sleep. Quite a good day 1.
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