June 22, 2006
Day 21: Elizabethtown, IL to Carbondale, IL
78.59 Miles, 6:18:31 Ride Time, 12.71 Average Speed, 38.1 Maximum Speed
My plan for the day was to ride to Carbondale and get to a bike shop. I hadn't had the bike checked out since the start of the trip; the bike shops I had expected to find in Berea and Bardstown were no longer in business. Because Carbondale was a fairly long ride across terrain that I expected to be hilly, I rode out earlier than any day so far - 6:15 (yes, I know it's Central Time, but I'm counting it anyway).
The ride on 146 was not too bad - there was some truck traffic, but leaving so early probably helped me avoid the worst of it. I knew at some point that I would have to climb out of the Ohio River valley, and I encountered the first big hill on Eddyville road.
After about 22 miles, I stopped at a store in Eddyville for gatorade, snacks (I left the B&B before the breakfast) and a water bottle refilling. The usual crowd of old guys were hanging around, but for the first time on the trip, they weren't too friendly. Usually, they make a point of asking where I'm going, etc. This time, I could hear them discussing me while I talked to the woman behind the counter. As I was leaving, one of the men finally addressed me directly, and asked which way I was going. I told him, and he immediately tried to tell me it was the wrong way to get to Carbondale, and that I should follow a "shortcut" which apparently would involve riding on the shoulder of a four lane highway. I asked him how many miles it would be, and he estimated 60 - more than I had already calculated I would ride if I stuck to my maps. I gave him an insincere "thanks" for his advice, and headed off, in the direction my maps told me to take.
Because I was in a hurry to get to Carbondale before the bike shops closed, I decided not to make any extended food/picture-taking stops today, and rode on through some pretty hilly countryside, especially the section from Eddyville to Goreville. My maps routed me through some backstreets in Goreville, where I normally would have spent more time exploring if I hadn't been in a hurry. At one point I was stopped at an interesection in Goreville double-checking the next turn, when a friendly guy in a truck slowed down and pointed me in the right direction.
After riding through some fairly nondescript countryside all morning, things changed for the better when I entered the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge. The first several miles were blessedly flat, although the road surface was a little rough. For the first time in days, I rode several flat miles with no headwinds; it was fun for a change to ride the bike at 20+ mph for minutes at a time.
Eventually this flat section turned into rollers, but even these were more fun than usual - I could get enough momentum on the steep downhills that I could just barely coast to the top of the next hill.
The twenty mile ride through the Wildlife Refuge was the highlight of the day - the fast flat sections, the sort-of-fun rolling hills, some nice shady sections, the ride past Devil's Kitchen Lake and Little Grassy Lake - I hated to see it end.
As my route took me out of the Wildlife Refuge and onto some back roads in suburban Carbondale, it started to rain, but it only lasted five minutes, (and was actually refreshing), before the sun came out again. I stopped for a minute to ask a jogger if I was going in the right direction, and she was impressed by the scope of my trip - it's always encouraging to get that kind of response (which, to be fair, has been the most common), rather than the "I wouldn't want to do it" from the guys at the store this morning.
The back road I had been riding on, Springer Ridge Road, suddenly dumped me out on a busy highway - this kind of transition from the countryside to four lanes of traffic is always startling - and I stopped at a service station to get gatorade and check my maps. I was going off route to get to the bike shops (and a place to stay for the night), so I spent some time figuring it out (and verifying with a couple of people in the store).
I rode on US 51, which took me past the college campus and through the typical university neighborhood (used bookstores, tattoo parlors, ethnic food, etc.) I stopped at the Carbondale Cycle Shop at about 2:00, and they said they could have the bike checked out in a couple of hours. I initially decided to walk around downtown, but it was so hot that I quickly went back to the shop, made calls back home on my cell phone, and basically just hung around until they could work on my bike.
After the bike shop guy finished (he rotated the tires, cleaned the chain, put new tape on the handlebars, and looked everything over), I asked about a motel, and he told me that everything decent was "out by the mall." Uh-oh. As I was afraid, that involved riding a couple of miles in six lanes of rush hour traffic. I settled on a Super-8 directly across from the mall, and on the same side of the highway as a Barnes & Noble bookstore.
The motel was kind of disappointing - the internet connection was painfully slow, the TV didn't work, and the snack machine had a cookie lodged in it that rendered in inoperable. I walked the half mile to the Barnes & Noble and bought a Wall Street Journal, which I hadn't read in months, then stopped for dinner at a BBQ place near the motel. The food was good, but the waitress seemed to want to hurry me along for some reason.
Back at the motel, I kidded around with the two college girls working at the front desk, about the many failings of this Super-8, and they laughingly agreed that things hadn't been going so well at the motel lately. They offered me some of the breadsticks that had come with the pizza they had ordered, to make up for the problems.
The TV had started working by now, (although the internet connection never really recovered), so I watched it for a while, and went to bed later than usual.
Today's ride: 79 miles (127 km)
Total: 1,239 miles (1,994 km)
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