June 30, 2012
Day 15: Monroeville, IN to Chain 'O Lakes State Park
(By Joy)
We slept well in the dark and quiet community center in Monroeville, and as we got up, we flicked on a few light switches to see whether the power had come back on during the night. It hadn't, but we opened all the doors to the building and used our headlamps to get packed up and ready to go. The morning quiet, though, was broken by a loud exclamation from Jeff that there was a mouse in the big industrial kitchen sink. I asked him whether maybe, perhaps, it was just the sponge that I knew was there since the shadows from our headlights make things look funny sometimes, but he assured me there was something alive in there, so Marie and I went to investigate and found a little beady-eyed mouse stuck there in the sink. After some maneuvering and assurances that I wasn't going to kill him, I finally got him into a bucket and took him outside to set him loose. He'll probably run right back inside, of course, but he at least headed in the opposite direction at first.
Jeff and I looked at the logbooks briefly over breakfast, where we found Jeff's entry from his 2008 visit and the only Mike Riscica sighting we'll have on this trip when Team Northern Tier stopped in 2007.
Marie was headed the way we'd come from, and we were headed north, but as we got ready to pull out, Warren, the famous host of the community center, came to chat with us for a while, mostly about the storm. We soon headed on our way—the wrong way, unfortunately, though we didn't know that until we were a couple of miles out of town. Apparently there are two different roads with the same name (though locals refer to them as Old and New), but Jeff stopped a car to figure out where we were, convinced me to go all the way back to town to start over, and we did get back on track. I don't know why, but being lost is so demoralizing to me. I immediately lost some confidence in the ACA map/route. I had gotten used to my own maps (well, using someone's maps and putting my important info on them, with their mileages down to a tenth of a mile and every paved road in the area labeled but had to readjust to the ACA maps with their limited contextual information. I was also demoralized because I thought just maybe we could do a long day to get to a hotel instead of going a few miles off route for another noisy state park campground, but adding extra miles that early in the day meant I didn't think we could do that, so I wasn't feeling too spunky in the morning even though the first miles of the day were cool and had little traffic.
I also wasn't feeling like riding today because the whole day felt like a big backtracking excursion to me. Yesterday, we'd gone around the south side of Fort Wayne, west to east, to get to Monroeville. Now, we were going around the north side, east to west, to head toward Michigan, crossing the same roads we'd crossed the day before, just miles north of where we'd already been. On top of that, power wasn't yet on anywhere in the area, so there was no ice and no cold drinks to be had. The people living there had it much worse, of course, so we didn't feel too bad for ourselves.
We did feel bad, though, when traffic started increasing and the route maps didn't match what was on the ground because of road construction and some suburban sprawl that had obviously taken place since the route was originally created.
As we headed toward Grabill, we also started to see more Amish on the road and had to start avoiding the “road apples” left by their horses. Traffic going into Grabill was backed up by a malfunctioning railroad crossing that left the crossing arms down for who knows how long, but just after we got through that, an Amish couple decided to take matters into their own hands and force the arm up. I don't know if they tied it up successfully because we left rather than gawk at them, but they were trying to clear out the traffic jam while we moved on.
Just down the road, we saw a grocery store that appeared to be selling things, still, and when we checked their ice freezer, we saw they still had some ice. A woman told us they had only big bags left, but we grabbed one of them anyway and went into the darkened store. The place was chaotic, though. Apparently, the store didn't have a generator and had finally given up on trying to keep its frozen foods frozen. They were giving away everything perishable for donation, and Amish women were descending on the store, texting their friends (yes, really) and calling local drivers to come pick up their cartfulls of frozen and refrigerated food. Inside, they were pawing through everything with their strong working hands, while kids were grabbing TV dinners and frozen cheeseburgers and other things they'd never normally get.
Jeff hadn't forced his way into the store like I had so I could pay for the ice and get some Pepsi, but he was enjoying the show in the parking lot, which was full of cars, trucks, and vans of people who drive the Amish around for a fee. We saw cars being jammed full of food as things disappeared out of freezers and off shelves. I went back inside to get some chocolate milk for us, and in just that time, almost everything had been cleared off the shelves. There were still a lot of frozen vegetables, but they were going fast, too. In the parking lot, you could see disappointment on some people's faces as they were told that all the good stuff was gone and triumph on the faces of others who'd scored big wheels of cheese or 12 dozen eggs. It was the quietest looting I ever expect to see, but it felt like a looting nonetheless. Very few people were giving more than a couple of dollars in donations, and though non-perishable food was supposed to be regular price, some of it was sneaking out the back door, too.
Jeff went in to talk to one of the clerks who was sad to see everything disappearing since it meant the store and its owner were losing so much money, but a non-Amish man we talked to in the parking lot said the store was mostly Amish-owned, so we're not sure how that worked. The Amish in this area seem to have adopted/adapted to more worldly things than some other Amish communities we've seen, and we later saw some ads for non-electric, gas-powered freezers, so I guess many of them had a place to put the food anyway.
We finally left the circus, only to find ourselves in some of the worst traffic of our trip around Leo. Some roads in the area were closed because of downed trees and power lines, so we had much more company on the road than we like and ended up doing a mile or so on sidewalks to stay away from the extra traffic. We kept thinking the route would get better, but instead, it was getting worse with big, busy, shoulderless roads with fast traffic that had us seriously questioning the wisdom of the route. We rode hard and fast to get through this section and had to take a brief rest at a local ball field in Huntertown to recover.
Traffic got better after that, but it still wasn't great. There was still no power in the area, and we hadn't seen any gas stations with working pumps, so we were hoping that eventually everyone would run out of gas and we'd have the roads to ourselves, but that wasn't to be. We did, however, start to see working stoplights and other evidence that there was some power in the area, so when we got to La Otto and saw it had power, we stopped at a bar to get a meal and soak up some air conditioning. We weren't really that hungry because of the heat, but we ate anyway, partly because it was almost time for dinner and I didn't want to cook in camp after such a long, hot day.
La Otto to the state park was a fairly nice ride, though we kept seeing more fast traffic than we like. The campground, as is so often the case, was a few miles from the entrance to the park, but the wide, smooth road and rolling hills made it go quickly. When we got to our assigned spot, though, we found some noisy neighbors nearby and changed to another campsite to get away from them. It was out of the frying pan and into the fire, though, as we soon got new neighbors and found ourselves with a group of noisy college girls on one side and a group of noisy college boys on the other. I thought maybe people would go to bed a little earlier since there was a nearly state-wide burn ban and no one could have a campfire, but people adapted and huddled around charcoal grills to drink instead. I ended up using earplugs to block out their noise and went to sleep fairly easily, but Jeff got to hear all their exploits and listen to the guys try to impress the girls with the fish they had caught. Another noisy state park campground we will try to avoid in the future.
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Today's ride: 61 miles (98 km)
Total: 637 miles (1,025 km)
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