3, 2, One Too Many

This is a BOGO special on blog posts. Given the general sameness of the scenery, yesterday and today have been pretty similar so I'm just doing a 2fer.

The ride itself is fairly mind-numbing, amounting to little more than an arrow-straight frontage road to I-55 across Illinois. There are stretches where they've turned chunks of the original highway into nice bike paths, but when you're not on those sections, the road is made up of a lot of broken concrete and rarely, if ever, a rideable shoulder. Fortunately, since it parallels the interstate (literally 50 feet away in some places), most of the traffic is there instead of the old "historic" 2-lane. Which brings me to this: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of "historic" is "famous or important in history, or potentially so". "Historic" to me does not mean Abe Lincoln took a dump here or that an old highway once went through here and people stopped for a bite to eat and fill up their cars. Every town we've passed through since yesterday morning (Wilmington, Gardner, Dwight, Odell, Pontiac, Chenoa, Lexington, McLean, Atlanta) all have "historic" downtowns and/or Route 66 museums. Admittedly, I haven't been in any of the museums, but we've passed by enough "historic" filling stations, diners, and auto body shops to get a decent idea of the contents of said museums. None of those towns, BTW, has a population over 2100 people, and unless you're from around here, I bet no one reading this post has ever heard of any of them, and I strongly doubt anything truly historic ever happened in any of them.

Even more than my vitriol directed at the highway, I couldn't be more displeased with the rate of flats I've been getting. We have traveled approximately 180 miles so far. I've had 3. By comparison, I didn't get my first flat last year for about 4500 miles and my second one took another 600 after that. I felt it was not unreasonable to expect I could make a 300-mile journey without one. The first one happened about 15 miles into yesterday's ride. Patched it and went on our way. The second one was about two miles later. My first thought was just a bad patch job, but the reality was a different hole. Tried to patch it but it wouldn't hold any air so replaced it with the spare. On we went. 45 more miles yesterday and the first 40 today went without incident. As we were leaving from our lunch stop, I noticed the tire was a little low. This time I didn't take it off, I just reinflated it and we continued on, stopping every 10 miles

or so to check it. We had to reinflate it one more time after that but made it to our hotel. I'm going to try the same thing tomorrow, as we just have a very short day to Dan's house (about 30 miles). If I can make it there, I'll get a couple more tubes and swap it out. The frosting on this pile of mechanical dog shit, is the discovery of a crack in my back rim - again. I replaced one last year at considerable cost and delay. The crack has not appeared to worsen since I noticed yesterday morning and with only about 130 miles to go to St. Louis, I'm keeping fingers crossed that it makes it that far.

Aside from my laundry list of complaints, we met two older gentlemen (mid 70's) out for a Sunday morning ride yesterday. We were heading the same direction so we rode with them for a few miles and they took us through the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery to meet up with Route 66 on the other side. I believe at least one of them was a veteran and they were telling us of the ceremonies planned for Memorial Day. They eventually turned and headed back toward Joliet and we went the other way down the "Mother Road". In addition, the company is excellent, as Dan and I have seamlessly picked up where we left off last summer, and thus far, there hasn't been too much in the way of wind, it hasn't been too hot, and tonight dinner is at Cracker Barrel.

I could take about 50 variations of this same photo along the ground we've covered so far. It's this or farmer's fields or the interstate.