Day3: Bloomington to Indianapolis IN

Monday June 10, 2019

Last night I had a very nice visit with my friends in Bloomington and today I had a mostly easy ride to Indianapolis, but with few problems along the way. I choose to follow a Gmaps route after clearing it with my friend Michael who, it turned out, used to live along it and with Jim, my host in Indianapolis. Jim was worried about the steep hills near Bloomington and Michael called them mountains, but didn't seem worried about my ability to climb them ;-}.

Gmaps did a good job of routing me north out of Bloomington on North Walnut St. That also meant routing me by McDs so I stopped and had a second breakfast of oatmeal and coffee. I figured it would be a long way to any services and, since I'd created yesterday's web page this morning, it had been a couple of hours since breakfast.

The most interesting thing at second breakfast was watching a young man on a rental E-scooter. He turned into McDs ahead of me and,as I was eating, he was playing with it in the parking lot and in the street. It looked like fun but it also looked like a traffic hazard for both cars and pedestrians.

Half a mile after leaving McDs, I turned onto Old State 37 - there seem to be lots variations of old 37 - and climbed into the 'mountains.' I think the first real climb was probably the biggest of the day. At a guess, the sustained grade was 6% and the hill felt like it was a mile long. Coming down from that ridge, I rode through a long flatish valley with the town of Dolan roughly centered in it.

Serious climbing began again roughly 5 miles later and I stopped by a small lake to snack and rest 12 miles into my trip,. That was when I discovered that I'd left my water bottles behind! Fortunately, I had packed some water - about a liter - in one of my panniers. That probably would have been enough for my riding day since the weather was quite cool, but I was able get functionally replacement bottles at Martinsville where I stopped for lunch at 1 PM. After lunch, I searched for Dollar General stores and modified my route very slightly to be able to stop at a nearby store and buy two one liter bottles of water that fit in the cages on my bike. At the end of the ride, I realized that I did have enough water without those bottles today.

The road after Martinsville was remarkably flat. In roughly 5 miles it ended at IN 67 which, 15 miles later,reached Indianapolis. 67 is a 4 lane expressway with good shoulders and moderate traffic including a lot of big trucks. It wasn't enjoyable riding but it was good get on down the road riding.

There was a messy interchange at I-465 where Gmaps on my phone crashed so I ended up having to navigate to my Jim's home just using the its GPS display info. That wasn't fun since some of the Gmaps date was out of date and the traffic was heavy. When I did get here it was about 5:30 and my Jim's wife greeted me and helped me get my bike into their garage. We were sitting on the back steps visiting when Jim got home.

I've been here two nights now and, because of weather, I really should have left today, but we've been enjoying each other's company so much that I'm staying another day.

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