Day8: Getting to Defiance OH

Friday June 21, 2019

I'm in my third state on this tour, but I only rode about two miles in KY to cross the Ohio River. Today, I rode a 50 mile ride roughly half in OH. It was quite flat with mostly light winds or tail winds, to Defiance. Then it was an 8 mile, hilly with headwind on the last half, ride from Defiance to where its motels are on the other side of the river. It would have been less than two miles with a little climbing and some side winds if the bridge had still been there. It is completely gone and they hope to have the new one in its place in another year.

Most of the ride from Fort Wayne IN to Defiance IN was really enjoyable but getting out of Fort Wayne is a lot more complicated now than it was 23 years ago and using Gmaps routing messed me up both getting out of Fort Wayne and into Defiance. It is good that I have a lot of experience doing my own routing since minor issues with Gmaps routing led to loss the Gmap route twice today. In both cases I was able to use Guru maps and my phones gps to figure out my own route after Gmaps lost its route.

The problem in both incidents was that I couldn't follow Gmaps route. In the first case, that route had a named bike path on the wrong side of a river and in the second, Gmaps used a road that might have been a usable dirt road through a field in dry weather, but it was a muddy mess today and even had a sign saying 'don't try it if it wet!' Each of these incidents resulted in Gmaps locking up trying to reroute and then losing the route data whch it stores offline. Interestingly, in another case of a closed bike path I couldn't ride, it recovered. I didn't check to see if it could have used my phones data connection to reroute in any of those cases since A) that phone uses a T-Mobile SIM which does not have very broad geographical coverage and, related to that, my plan does not have much data available.

The Gmaps routing I did use was very good and obviously based on local knowledge since a lot of it had color coded pavement marking for multiple routes used on organised rides. For the first time on this tour, I saw multiple recreationalriders on my ride. Five of them in two groups!

My back is still hurting, but it is improving, and my seat post is still clicking and it has become a constant click with every half crank rotation. Yesterday - I'm writing this in the morning - riding was mostly very peaceful except for that damned clicking ;-{! riding with traffic, I hardly notice it but yesterday it was extremely annoying. I realized today that I'm going to have a hard time replacing it. The really good mechanic in Kokomo didn't have seatposts in stock. Why should he? This morning I switched back to my old seat and lubricated all three pivots in the seat post with Extreme Lube. Chain lube is the only lube I carry on tour.

In Defiance, all the motels are in one area. Fortunately for me, that area is on one side of US 24 and Walmart is roughly half a mile away on the other side of that road. That meant I could walk there to get replacement underwear and ear plugs. It wasn't a pleasant walk - walking on an expressway over a bridge over another expressway with, as usual, NO provisions for pedestrians, but here, as in Indiana, almost all drivers are very considerate so it wasn't dangerous.

Today, except for a moderate headwind, looks like a great day for riding to Toledo. I'll be riding part way on the Wabash Cannonball Trail.

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