Day 6: Jasonville, IN to Bridgeton, IN

June 21, 2012

(By Jeff)

We slept well in the scuzzy Shakamak motel (excuse me - “Inn”). I've actually slept in more disgusting places while bike touring (such as the infamous fish-cleaning shed in 2008), but I felt bad for taking Joy to such a place. Turns out she was fine with it, since she just needed an air conditioner and a bed.

We stopped at the town's Casey's convenience store for some of their breakfast pizza (Joy) and chocolate milk (me), and then returned to the backroads route that Joy has done a great job putting together for this tour. In the first eight miles on the country roads, we saw two (slow moving) cars and one tractor. It was getting hot already, so we stopped occasionally under shade trees and talked about nothing in particular. I had mentioned a couple of days ago that I “had no legs” (meaning that I felt weak while riding), and Joy told me that ever since then, she had this Forrest Gump quote stuck in her head: “But you ain't got no legs, Lieutenant Dan!” This led to a brief recreation of one of the scenes from the movie, after which we forced ourselves to leave the shade tree and start riding again.

A while later we arrived at a “T” intersection with a busier state highway, and before braving the ½ mile on it, pulled into a church parking lot for a snack of butter cookies dipped in Nutella.

After the short and uneventful ride on the slightly busier road, we were back on the nice 1 ½ lane farm roads again, this time with more of the shady, tree-lined sections we've seen lately. So much more pleasant than the almost shadeless roads we saw the first few days in Illinois.

When Joy was planning the route a few months ago, she noticed that there was something called the “Exotic Feline Rescue Center” only ¼ mile off the route. This is a non-profit organization that rescues lions, tigers and other “exotic” big cats from bad circumstances and gives them a nice place to live out their lives (since they cannot be returned to the wild after growing up near, and depending upon, humans.) We each paid $10 for an hour-long tour of the place, and I found it unexpectedly fascinating, especially some of the stories of the rescues themselves (for example, one tiger had been kept in a tattoo parlor in Gary, Indiana, and his crazy owner would walk him on a leash through the inner city neighborhood.) Some of the other cats had been kept crated in a warehouse, and had never touched the ground or seen the sky until their rescue. The place was well worth visiting.

Later, after more nice back roads, we crossed the super-busy US 40 in the little town of Harmony, which nowadays apparently consists solely of the Harmony Diner. We stopped there for a leisurely late lunch, and when we walked back outside, were happy to find that the sky was overcast, and the temperature had dropped several degrees. After several days in the hot, merciless sun, this would be the first pleasant end to a day of riding we'd had.

We made it to the tiny town of Bridgeton fairly early, and found that the campground Joy had found on the internet was actually the town's former high school grounds, whose current owners were a family who lived in part of the building, and used the rest of it for various businesses. After visiting the famous Bridgeton Mill for ice cream, and watching local teenagers show off by diving off the covered bridge, we returned to the old high school to assess the camping situation. After hearing about (and actually seeing one of) the coyotes that sometimes hung out behind the school house, I was relieved when the nice lady who owned the place said we could just sleep inside on the gym floor. After showering in the old school's locker room, we talked to some of the local kids hanging around, played with the dogs, Samson and Delilah, and then retired to the gym floor for the night.

A really nice day, although my failure to eat dinner would haunt me tomorrow.