Day Thirty-Six: Roseville, Illinois to Beardstown, Illinois

July 15, 2019

I slept well and was up early. Last night I'd bought a bag of ice from the grocery, and had unwisely left it sitting on the bathroom floor, where, unsurprisingly, it had melted everywhere. So I spent some time mopping it up.

I was ready to go before dawn, but decided to take the time to walk a block to The Lunch Box restaurant for breakfast. I arrived at exactly 5:00, when the place opened, and was the first customer.

Not long after I sat down and ordered my food, a couple of men came in. They were obviously regular customers - the waitress didn't even bother asking what they wanted to eat.

One of them picked up a fly swatter and began methodically killing flies. After he killed each one he would, for some reason, examine its body. This grossed me out and made it a little hard to enjoy my omelet. The guy seemed proud of his fly-killing ability, and even bragged to the waitress about it.

I walked back to the motel, brushed my teeth, got on the bike and rode to the other end of town for my usual stop at the inevitable Casey's, filled this time of day with men in reflective vests and similar attire on their way to work.

I rode on the wide shoulder of a busy highway for a while, but then grew tired of that, and exited onto a series of country roads. I was figuring out today's route as I rode, which is always a little stressful, and certainly not the most efficient way to do a bike tour. I didn't even have a destination in mind today.

The decent chip-seal surface turned to rough, rough gravel. A large dog came out from an unkempt yard, and would NOT back off. I got out the bear spray I was carrying - I'd left the "Halt!" dog pepper spray behind in a motel room weeks ago - and was two seconds from learning what its effect would be on the dog when the owner finally emerged and called him off.

I speculated that maybe the dog had never seen a cyclist before - surely nobody would intentionally ride their bike on this rough road in the middle of nowhere - when I saw an approaching cyclist wearing a RAGBRAI jersey pushing/carrying his light, skinny-tired road bike!

I never determined why the guy was on this road, which could not have been more unsuitable for a road bike. I warned him about the dog, but he seemed unconcerned, and, after giving me some helpful routing advice, walked his bike on down the road.

In a while I turned right onto smooth pavement, and after several miles of nice riding, arrived in Bushnell, population 3,117. This was a heavy industrial town, with a noisy train track right through the center of downtown. As in so many Illinois towns, the streets were incredibly rough and suffering from a lack of maintenance. How much worse can Illinois' fiscal condition get? All of the rural parts of the state that I've seen - and I've seen a lot while cycling there in the last several years - are crumbling worse than any other place I've been in the USA.

After a brief stop at Hardee's, I left Bushnell on a series of empty, mostly gravel roads, in a successful attempt to avoid traffic.

I arrived in Table Grove, population 416, to find that almost everything in the downtown was either closed today, or defunct.

There was a cute little food truck, which seemed out of place in the sleepy town, but it was closed on Mondays.

There was a small bar, though, where I was the only customer this time of day. The lady running the place had no food, but I sat at the bar and drank a few sodas. Periodically she'd leave me alone in the place while she went outside to smoke a cigarette.

She was nice, and gave me some helpful advice about which of the nearby country roads were paved, and which were gravel.

I made my way to Vermont, population 667, which seemed to have even less going on than Table Grove.

By now I'd decided I'd end the day in a larger river town, Beardstown, which, in conversations with people throughout the day, I'd mistakenly referred to as "Beardsville." No one had corrected me.

There was only one way into Beardstown - crossing the Illinois River on a bridge which I hadn't researched to see how bicycle/pedestrian-friendly it was. It was too late now to change my route, and I'd have to cross the river at some point anyway, so I just kept riding.

Finally the bridge into Beardstown came into view. Holy shit. It was very, very long - three spans - and I could see from a half mile away that it was filled with fast truck traffic.

I rode close enough to see that it was extremely narrow, with the most minimal of shoulders.

For the first time ever on a bike tour, I stuck out my thumb. I waited for 20 minutes on the litter-strewn gravel shoulder while several pickup trucks passed without slowing down. One person stopped, but it was a guy in a compact car, far too small to carry me and my bike across the bridge. [Later I realized that I could have asked him to follow me across the bridge with his flashers on, but I didn't think of that at the time.]

It was looking stormy, or at least rainy, and I decided I had to get across the bridge, so I waited for a small gap in the traffic and started across. I would not want to do that again. It was certainly the scariest river crossing I've ever done.

Beardstown, population 6,123, was one of the nastiest towns I've ever seen on a bike tour. Everything, and I mean everything, in the place seemed to be coated with a layer of grime. Virtually everyone I encountered was in a sour mood. There were two motels in town, and judging by their online reviews, they were terrible. I asked a woman working at the Casey's which motel was the less horrible of the two, and she paused long enough in her complaints to a co-worker about their hot, uncomfortable Casey's uniforms to snarl her racially-tinged opinion.

The motel was, as I anticipated, the absolute pits. It was large, and obviously at one time had been nice, but it had fallen far, far from its glory days years before when it had been a Super 8.

I went into my dirty room to find that the air conditioner, which is 50% of the reason I stay in motels instead of camping, was barely working, so I went back to the lobby and appropriated one of the many fans that were sitting around trying and failing to keep the place cool. (The motel's owners had long ago given up on paying for air conditioning in the common areas of the place.)

Interestingly, the one friendly person I met in Beardstown was another touring cyclist staying at this dump. He was going in the other direction, though, and hadn't seen the bridge yet. I didn't want to ruin his evening by telling him how bad it was, so I just suggested he get as early a start tomorrow as possible, and get it over with as soon as possible.

I walked to a filthy Dollar General store and brought some snacks back to my room for dinner, trying not to breathe in the clouds of fumes emitted by groups of suspicious characters standing outside the motel smoking.

I worked out a route for tomorrow that would get me out of Beardstown as quickly as possible, and went to sleep in my hot room with the fan roaring approximately 18 inches from my head.

Today's ride: 80 miles (129 km)
Total: 2,889 miles (4,649 km)

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