July 1, 2012
Day 16: Chain 'O Lakes State Park to Shipshewana, IN
(By Joy)
We decided early in the morning that, if possible, today would be a hotel day, especially since the heat was making us sleep fitfully, at best, in the tent despite Nyquil and earplugs. It was so humid that none of our laundry had dried, either. Even my expensive, quick-dry underwear was about as wet as when I'd hung it up 10 hours earlier.
We had a few miles to go to get back on route, and Jeff was really dragging. That much humidity that early in the day is really hard to deal with because it makes you feel like you can't breathe very well, which makes hill-climbing on a bike pretty tough.
We stopped in the first town of the day, Albion, to try to find breakfast, but the only thing open was a gas station, so we downed a few things and got ready for the rest of the day. As I came out from the store, some guy was asking Jeff all about the trip and told us that the Amish were really big into recumbent bicycles. I didn't buy it as I'd never seen an Amish person in any state on a recumbent, but later in the day, a local roadie cyclist and then some ads in an Amish paper confirmed that there was indeed a market for them among the Amish.
There wasn't much traffic on a Sunday morning in this area, for which we were grateful. We had a nice conversation with the local roadie, who expressed some interest in touring, so we pointed him to Crazy Guy and Adventure Cycling to check things out. We tried to convince him to do the TransAm, so hopefully he'll do it someday! He tried to convince us to go up the coast of Lake Michigan, but we're trying to avoid traffic, and with the holiday coming up, I can't imagine the coastal roads will be lightly traveled...Instead, we stayed on Indiana's pleasant rural roads.
We kept moving through more Amish country, passed a group of Amish boys on bicycles, and stopped near La Grange for milkshakes at a roadside ice cream stop before moving on to Shipshewana, our destination for the night. We needed part of a day to recuperate from the heat and get caught up on some chores, and while we thought we might get into town earlier, our 2:30 arrival gave us enough time for showers and a brief nap before we plowed our way through a mediocre buffet at a pizza place that appeared to be the only place open in town on a Sunday. We hadn't eaten much for lunch, and as we tried to leave the hotel at 4:00 to go eat, a freak rainstorm came through, so we went back to the room and waited for that to die down. On our second attempt, we got to the pizza place just before 5:00 (beating out the old people in RVs that pulled in a bit later), and by 5:30, the place was hopping with people looking sideways at Jeff's stack of 7 empty plates.
After dinner, Jeff did a lot of work on the journal and sorted through the tons of pictures we'd taken the previous days. He also had to take care of some work for his real job. Our hotel's internet was slow to upload, though, and we stayed up way later than usual getting everything done. We went to bed hoping we'd have drier clothes than yesterday and enjoying a firm bed in a quiet, dark place.
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Today's ride: 42 miles (68 km)
Total: 679 miles (1,093 km)
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