August 23, 2022 to August 24, 2022
Another Shakedown Ride
I decided to do another practice overnight trip with everything on the bike. This time I searched on Google Maps and found a public campground about 70 miles northeast of Evansville. I thought I'd give tent camping another try. I hate camping, but I have a dogged determination to keep trying it once in a while.
It's unfortunately impossible to ride a bike from Henderson, Kentucky, where we live, directly across the Ohio river to Evansville, Indiana, so early Tuesday morning I drove with the bike to a friend's house in Evansville, parked my car in their driveway, and headed out on country roads.
I made a routing mistake early on and rode on a busier-than-expected road for a couple of miles instead of a quieter parallel road. It was not a big deal, though, and pretty soon I was on very, very quiet roads.
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For the first several turns, I followed the painted markings of something called "HFEST", which must be a cycling event that I'd never heard of. Even though we live just across the river from Evansville, I almost never ride over there, and don't follow their cycling "scene" at all.
(Henderson, where we live, has a population of 30,000 people yet has an amazingly miniscule cycling "scene" - there are literally only six or seven of us who ride bikes, and all of us almost always ride alone.)
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2 years ago
The ride was pleasant. There wasn't a lot to see, but that's alright with me; I'm very, very easily amused when I'm riding the bike. I was a little surprised to pass a radio station on a very rough gravel road:
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2 years ago
After 25 miles of alternating corn fields and soybean fields, and alternating chip seal roads and gravel roads, I arrived in tiny Buckskin, too small to have a population listed.
I stopped and examined an interesting old ramshackle house there. The walls were covered with all kinds of odd stuff, and the yard was filled with a variety of weird junk. Interestingly, it appeared that the owner's hoarding had outgrown his own property and had started to encroach onto the stop sign in the road next to his place:
The owner had written "Turtles" on his house in several places, and also on the back of the stop sign, for some inexplicable reason.
I would liked to have known a little more about what this all meant, but not enough to engage in what would undoubtedly be a lengthy conversation with the guy who lived there, so after a few more photos, I got back on the road.
In another 25 miles I arrived in Winslow, population 864.
A small coffee shop / café was open, and I went inside. I overcame my initial disappointment upon learning that they didn't sell soda pop, ordered a Panini and a lemonade, and attempted to discreetly eavesdrop on the conversation of the table around which six locals crowded.
One of them asked me how many miles I'd ridden so far. They seemed extremely impressed by my response of "fifty", and so of course I went through my now-well-practiced little speech about how it's not that hard once you get used to it, blah, blah, blah.
After I finished lunch, one of the men walked outside as I was getting the bike ready and broached the topic of religion, a subject that I am, at this point in my life, well practiced at diverting. So it wasn't as awkward as it could have been.
More quiet roads, and more gravel than I expected when I quickly planned the route a day or two before the ride.
The last 25 miles to the campground went more slowly. I was getting tired. I had to ride 2 miles on an unpleasantly busy state highway, but then it was super quiet roads all the way to the Glendale Fish and Wildlife Area, where there was a surprisingly large, nicely shaded primitive camping area away from the handful of RVs in the park.
I did the usual camp-making chores, took a shower at the decent-but-not-great facilities, ate a few snacks from my pannier (there were no food or vending machines in the campground), and waited until it was dark enough to try to go to sleep. Sleep came a lot earlier than my last attempt at camping a few weeks ago, after I remembered to take the Advil PM that I'd brought this time.
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I only woke up once during the night - some animal that I could not identify was making a sort of screeching sound - and was awakened for good by my alarm at 5:00.
I waited a surprisingly long time for it to get light enough to start packing things up. Only later did I realize that my phone must have switched from Central to Eastern time sometime during yesterday's ride.
I decided to just retrace my route from yesterday. I'd previously worked out a longer, different way back, but I decided I didn't feel like dealing with the uncertainty of that today; I was a little anxious to get home.
The short section of busy highway was worse this morning, and I was glad to get that over with, and happy to be back on zero-traffic gravel.
The relatively few hills seemed steeper this morning, I suppose because I was tired after yesterday's ride. It's hard to take photos of hilly roads, but this one did the hill justice, I'd say:
I stopped at the Beacon of Light Café in Winslow again, for pancakes this time. They were good, but I was really, really craving an ice cold Diet Pepsi. I can't imagine why the café refuses to sell soda pop.
I noticed while I was paying my bill ($4.25 for two pancakes and a glass of water), that a bible was open next to the cash register, and a passage was underlined. I don't know anything about the bible, and was very slightly curious about the significance of the underlined passage, but I was not going to risk starting a possibly lengthy conversation about it with the employee running my credit card.
Back on the road I saw a few new things to photograph. I also got lost a couple times, something for which there is really no excuse since it was the same route (albeit in reverse) as yesterday, and my phone was reading turn-by-turn directions to me.
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With about 25 miles to go, I was feeling a little smug about the good time I was making. Not bad for back-back 75-mile days on a heavy, loaded touring bike!
And then I came up on this:
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Fresh oil. Very, very fresh oil. It had been spread since I was on the road yesterday, and possibly this very morning. I spent several minutes looking at my map, but couldn't find a reasonable detour.
So I made the unfortunate decision to just ride on it. What a mistake. The bike, and me, were already a mess by the time I was a third of the way through, but at that point I felt like I was committed.
By the time I'd ridden through the oil, I was covered with it, and I spent several minutes, and all of my wet wipes, trying to remove oil and rock from my body. I didn't even try to remove it from the bike. I lost much hair from my legs yanking off the little oily rocks.
The last twenty-something miles were, unsurprisingly, extremely unpleasant in the now 90 degree heat, as the oil-covered tires continued to kick up gravel in my face and onto my still-oily legs. The front derailleur was mostly inoperable since it was so gummed up from oil and rock, but at least I didn't really need the small front chain ring in this flattish terrain.
Hours later, after my extremely patient wife had assisted me in the extensive cleaning job, the bike was mostly back to normal, and I was mostly unscathed after multiple scrubbing sessions in the shower.
So, two lessons learned from this trip: Take an Advil PM tablet (or two) to hasten sleep in the tent, and, most importantly, never, ever, ride on a freshly oiled road again.
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