Champaign, Illinois to Crawfordsville, Indiana

It was a really great ride today. Perfect weather. Sunny, but not hot, and really no significant wind at all. The road surfaces were great and traffic was minimal. Other than a still sore right hip and right shoulder (both of which do seem to be slowly improving), I felt great.

The ride today was stated as 79 miles. I will go with that. (The odometer on my bike's computer says 80.9, but who is counting?)

Yesterday had been a full rest day in Champaign. It was great. It is almost difficult to reflect back now and think about how truly little I did, or accomplished, during the entire day! It was great.

Chris Hall's husband surprised her. He flew in to Champaign on the day that we arrived, just to see her. It was great to meet him. Chris' sister, Kathy, also showed up in Champaign, that arrival as entirely expected and planned. She is joining the trip, and she will ride with us all the way to Boston.

Chris' husband had a rental car. Neat. While she was holding ice on her freshly traumatized right hip, exactly as I had been doing last week, he kindly drove some of us to a really nice bike shop in Champaign. I got a new helmet there, as the helmet that I had purchased in Chillicothe, (my only choice there then) was really too small. I got a nice new helmet, one that fits perfectly, as well as a nice lightweight rain jacket and a pair of new riding shorts. Pretty cool.

Today's trip was a really nice ride. People who travel from Champaign to Crawfordsville generally have the good sense to use vehicles with internal combustion engines. They travel on I-74, and the whole trip probably takes barely over an hour. Obviously we with the more primative means of transportation are not about to take that road.

We left Champaign and traveled east on highway 150. That basically parallels I-74, and it is what Bobby Frost may have been referring to when he wrote about the "road less traveled." With I-74 taking away what we didn't want to see or deal with, we had a really nice ride to Danville, Illinois.

We got to Danville at a little more than halfway into our ride. That is the last Illinois city before the Indiana border. We had a SAG there at a park. (That park had restrooms!) People seemed to be only mildly annoyed when I made a point of personally welcoming them to the city that had been named after me.

In Danville, we left highway 150 and connected to highway 136. That basically did in Indiana what 150 had done for us in Illinois, nicely paralleling I-74 and taking us into Crawfordsville.

One of the last things you see in Danville, just south of highway 150, is a HUGE State of Illinois Prison. It is enormous. It really looks ominous and frightening. On the road nearby is a huge sign telling motorists not to pick up any hitchhikers, due to the proximity of the Prison there.

I really wanted to get my picture taken, hitchhiking right by that sign, but no one was riding with me at the time. Missed opportunity.

Once in Indiana, we traveled through truly beautiful small towns. We went through Covington, Veedersburg, and Hillsboro. It was a really nice ride. I love the sign you see as you ride into Hillsboro. Indiana means now Eastern Time Zone.

Tomorrow we ride to Indianapolis. That's the home of Mary Anne Jones and Troy Haider. Maybe time will enable me to contact them then. Time is short on this trip, but we will see.