Wow! Was today ever difficult!
Today we went for 107 miles, and it felt to me as if it had been double that mileage. I had awakened well rested this morning, and the weather was fine all day long, so I don't have a good explanation. For some reason however, I was just totally generally out of energy all day long today.
Leaving Quincy this morning, we had a fair amount of climbing. Indeed, the initial third of today's ride was reminiscent of Missouri's roller coaster hills. All told, we had 4,000 feet of climbing today, and virtually all of that was in the first third of the ride. I was having as much trouble keeping up my speed even then, early in the day, as if it was late in the day. Nothing specific, I was just inexplicably "out of gas" all day today.
At 46 miles into today's ride we came to the Illinois River. The bridge over that river (see photo above) was worse than yesterday's bridge at the Mississippi River. Yesterday, crossing the Mississippi River, there were two separate bridges, one (the nicer and newer one) going east-to-west, and the other going west-to-east. Those bridges both had no shoulders at all, but both had two lanes, so it wasn't so bad to take up a full lane for the short duration of the crossing. Today's Illinois River crossing involved one bridge only across the river, for all traffic going both ways, again with no shoulder at all. There was only one lane of traffic for each direction. The only thing we could do was cross our fingers and ride fast.
It worked.
East of the Illinois River, the terrain became remarkably (mercifully) more flat. I found that I could keep my speed up reasonably well, but it still was a struggle. Hopefully I will inherit more energy by tomorrow morning.
Getting into Springfield today, a more urban region, the general demeanor of the automobile drivers took a plunge from bad to worse. Kansas drivers had been uniformly safe and courteous. Missouri drivers were not nearly so good, but I could live with most of them. Illinois drivers, at least from what I have witnessed so far, all should be forcibly extracted from the planet Earth permanently. (It is inconceivable that they can ever be rehabilitated or retrained, so they should just be removed from the planet permanently.)
Tomorrow we go to Champaign, Illinois. That will be an 87 mile ride with nice terrain. Only 2,000 feet of total climbing tomorrow. That's the good news. The bad news is that we have rain, and probable thunderstorms, predicted for this entire area, for all day tomorrow. Yuck!
I am pretty tired. As I finish this posting, I see that it is almost 8:00 PM now. I will surely not be awake much longer.
As I reflect upon how tired I am now however, I would even now reiterate my earlier stated opinion that a bad day on a bike is still always better than a good day at work! I may be wasted now, but that doesn't change the fact that this trip is still a great time!
More tomorrow, after our swim to Champaign.
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