Day 12: West Lafayette, IN to Fletcher Lake Campground

June 27, 2012

(By Joy)

We knew it would be hard to leave the creature comforts of the basement lair we'd been in for three nights, but after looking at the maps and the weather, we decided to try to get our earliest start yet. The 5:30 alarm was painful, but we were rolling at 6:30 and trying to soak up as much of the cool morning air as possible before the heat and humidity caught us.

We expected some traffic leaving town, but since I'd ridden these roads before, I thought I had a decent route. However, road construction on some nearby thoroughfares meant that my side-roads were now prime commuting routes, and we had lots of company on the road all the way from Lafayette to way past Battle Ground. Pretty Prairie Road, Tyler Road, and even Bicycle Bridge Road were all much busier than I thought they'd be, so we decided to take a detour and skip Delphi altogether, going through Pittsburg instead. The tiny town had two restaurants, but neither was open for breakfast, so we ate some snacks from our snack bag and headed up the road.

Not far up the road, we got on Towpath Road, a road I'd ridden only once before on a very long day-trip to Logansport. I'd remembered it being a bit rough in places, but quiet and shady. At this point in the day, I wasn't sure whether I should trust my memory since my earlier routing hadn't been so good, but we found the road to be just as I remembered it—a great contrast to the more heavily traveled roads earlier in the day.

Eventually, though, we left the Towpath for a few miles on other backroads on the way to the Panhandle Pathway Trail, a paved bike path. In an attempt to avoid a stretch of busy highway to get to the path, the directions I'd created included a stretch of bumpy gravel parallel to some railroad tracks, and instruction to “jump railroad tracks” at a certain point. After we did that, though, my instructions to head to the left seemed wrong to Jeff since it looked like we were on private property, but I remembered how the satellite view of Google Maps had looked and was sure the path was somewhere nearby. I rode through a yard and down some little path through the woods before finally parking the bike to scout ahead. Jeff really wanted to turn around, but as the wooded path deteriorated, the paved path finally appeared. Jeff later said he'd never been more certain that I'd been wrong, but we got on the path (which, to be fair, did appear to start in the middle of nowhere with no real road access).

The path seemed nearly new, but there was little shade along it, and we were getting hot. A few miles up the path, we stopped in Royal Center, where a quick dash into a very smokey bar convinced us to head for a drive in/diner instead. The town had some truck and agriculture traffic, which Jeff found unpleasant, but the drive in thing had indoor seating and was air conditioned, so I thought it was an ok place for lunch. Jeff was too hot to have much of an appetite and went outside to escape some annoying kids in the place, but my tenderloin was good (you have to eat at least one tenderloin while in Indiana—it's a rule).

We were headed for a service-free town for our overnight stop, so we had to get any snacks/food we needed for the rest of the day there in Royal Center. Jeff was more than ready to leave town, but we knew we needed to get ice to try to stay cool, so we hit up the gas station on the way out of town and filled every bottle and our little cooler with ice.

As I was getting back on the path after our stop, though, I nailed a big railroad bed rock with my back wheel and flatted almost instantly. Ugh. My back wheel is such a pain to change because of all the extra chain on the bike and the way the kickstand gets in the way of the skewer, so we took up residence in the nearest shady spot to change it. The wheel came off fairly easily, I found the hole in the tube but decided to throw a new tube in the tire and just patch it in camp. Jeff helped me get the tire back on the wheel and was patient with all my ranting and swearing as we tried to get the wheel back on. After a couple of attempts and after getting way more chain grossness on my hands than I should have, we were back on our way, the day hotter than ever.

The path wasn't our favorite, and we weren't particularly sad to leave it to get on the Northern Tier route for a while. Jeff had ridden this cross-country route in 2008 and was excited about the possibility of seeing other cyclists, but his lack of food at the earlier stop was making him drag a bit. We did, however, meet two cyclists going from New York to Seattle and stopped to chat with them for a while, which perked him up a bit. I was starting to drag, too, from the heat and the unrelenting sun. The country roads we were on had very few places to stop for shade, and I was getting a headache from hitting all the cracks in the pavement. Jeff tried to cheer me up with refrains of “I am Woman” and new lyrics to “Slow Ride”--that did help, but I was hot and tired toward the end of the day. Where the asphalt had been tarred, it was so hot that some of it was bubbling up, and when we ran over the bubbles, we popped them. It was damn hot.

Eventually, though, we dragged ourselves into Fletcher, a tiny town with a pretty little lake and a pop machine. I'd been in Fletcher a few years earlier when I met Mike Riscica and Team Northern Tier, and I had tried to prepare him for it, but the place is kind of weird. It's a little campground with a few permanently placed 5th wheels that no one occupies most of the time, so we were the only ones there. Camping was $7, and we found a local to take our money, though I'm pretty sure we put about the same amount in the pop machine throughout the evening since the water in the campground smelled and tasted a little off.

Jeff got the tent set up while I showered (or attempted to...it only sort of worked), and we opted not to do laundry since we didn't want everything having the rusty, sulfur smell of the water. After a brief nap, I cooked dinner while Jeff tried to befriend the campground bunnies, and the rest of the evening was uneventful but for the constant noises from our only neighbors—the resonant bullfrogs of the little lake.

Today's ride: 66 miles (106 km)
Total: 471 miles (758 km)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	3
Comment on this entry	Comment	0