Day Two: Olney, Illinois to Washington, Indiana

April 16, 2016

My original, ambitious plan for today was to reach the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana. I rode out of Olney early enough, despite the long day yesterday. I didn't spend too much time looking around the town. I'd already seen the famous white squirrels on the tour that Joy and I did together in 2012, so I didn't spend any time seeking them out.

I took a couple of photos of downtown Olney, then headed out on country roads that paralleled US-50.

It was a typically wet Spring in this super-flat part of downstate Illinois. I'd worked out what I thought we be an extremely low-traffic route into Indiana, and I doggedly kept to the route despite the increasingly flooded fields as I inched closer to the Wabash River.

Finally I had to stop. The water was completely over the road.

I backtracked several miles and headed north to Lawrenceville (population 4,165.)

I remember eating a snack somewhere in Lawrenceville - I'm not sure if it was a gas station or a café - and talking to a local man about the road conditions, and then I headed southeast toward Vincennes, the first town in Indiana.

This was a pleasant route, and crossing the Wabash River into Indiana at Vincennes was easy. It was too bad I'd wasted about fourteen miles on my ill-fated original route, since the more direct route from Lawrenceville to Vincennes was fine.

After Vincennes I meandered to the small town of Bicknell, the downtown area of which seemed oddly deserted. It was 60 miles to the edge of Bloomington, and I determined that it was probably impossible to get there before dark.

I abandoned my original route and headed south, then east. My first attempt at crossing the White River failed. Water was over the road on the other side of the bridge:

The remaining miles to Washington, population 12,412, were pleasant, as I recall, although I had to ride on big, busy US-50 the last few miles into town.

I checked into a motel which I don't remember much about, except that I had some difficulty lugging the loaded bike up the outside stairs to the second floor.

Dinner was at a nearby Mexican restaurant, the Hacienda. (And no, my memory is not so good that I remembered that six years later. I had to consult the credit card transactions in the Quicken personal finance software that I use.)

After dinner I walked the downtown area taking photos of the usual things that interest me.