Champaign, Illinois to Crawfordsville, Indiana

Today started much more smoothly than yesterday. I was up at 5:30 AM and down to the hotel lobby for breakfast before 6:00. Loading was supposed to be at 7:00 but Andy got confused with the time and had the trailer open at 6:45. I was one of the first to load. Rick and I were some of the first riders to depart at 7:00 AM. At home I wouldn’t normally be up this early on a Sunday morning.

It was a beautiful morning with temperature of 68 degrees and blue sky with no wind. There was a haze on the horizon over the corn fields and soy bean fields as we headed east into the sun. The early morning haze reminds me of Virginia a lot. I think it is related to the increased humidity.

We were riding on mostly country roads so traffic was very light. The roads in the rural areas run mostly East/West or North/South and are numbered rather than named. Of course when you come into a town all the streets have names.

We rode through the small town of Danville,Il before crossing into Indiana. When we entered Indiana we crossed into the Eastern Daylight time zone. Now my bike computer agrees with the actual time. I didn’t change t from Eastern time when I started the ride.

We came into the small town of Hilsboro and noticed the most Interesting sign announcing the town.

There were not many hills on today’s ride. We finished our ride of 82 miles at about 2:30 PM Eastern Daylight time.

I took this picture of Gary and Deb Neumayer today relaxing in the hotel lobby after the ride. They are a husband wife couple from New Lenox, IL. Deb has a lot of experience biking is a very fast rider. She is usually in a group of early finishers. She shares her advice freely and is concerned for other riders that are struggling. She was an art teacher. Gary has recently retired from the corporate world and is less experienced as a biker, but has improved his pace dramatically on this trip. He is a CPA and has held various corporate positions during his career. Gary has a great sense of humor and a ready smile. At the halfway point of our ride across the country, Gary in true accounting fashion gave a presentation on statistics of the ride which included: Number of flats by the group, Max number of flats for a rider, amount of sunscreen used by the riders, amount of chamois crème used, number of calories consumed by the group, pounds lost by the group 152 (0ne person). He stated that the accounting rules used were GBE (Gary’s Best Estimate) and WAG.

Tomorrow we have a shorter mileage day of 62 miles. There will be many interesting opportunities tomorrow as we have the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a “Roark” titanium bike factory, and the Major Taylor Velodrome on our route.