Big
Ride Updates...
37. Naperville to LaPorte, IN 7/24 Miles 102.8 Total 2465
Our
ride today was like yesterday's with several exceptions. It was a lot
longer. We started in the city and we ended up in rural farmlands. With
the exception of 13 miles of smooth bike path converted from a railroad,
the roads were worse: cracked and crumbling pavement with uneven attempts
at patches. We were bumped, jarred and rattled, pummeled and pounded.
We all had fun when we were introduced to Indiana, but after that, our
impressions deteriorated with the road.
I arrived
in LaPorte very tired and very weary. How quickly a situation can change.
Larry Noel (PHOTO: Larry) lives in LaPorte and rode in the Big Ride last
year. He, his family and friends were waiting for us with a party, a pig
roast. They had been preparing for weeks and cooking for most of the day.
Two pigs were ready for carving . Potatoes were fried in a big open skillet
and corn was roasted in its husks . Baked beans, potato salad, tossed
salad, pasta salad, sauerkraut, rolls, and enough home baked pies, brownies,
cakes and cookies to make good company to three kinds of ice cream complimented
the main dishes.
The
tables were set with flowers and "biker food": bananas, Twinkies and chips.
We stuffed ourselves. People from town served us, talked with us and joined
in the fun. After dinner there was dancing on the lawn including the "chicken
dance" (if you haven't done this one, you must not have been to camp in
the summer) and the "hokey pokey" (the longest version I've ever heard).
And at 9:00, the music stopped; the host, his family and friends all went
home and left us to quickly, quietly and contentedly collapse into our
tents. What happened to my "fatigue", my "weariness"? Were they real?
Did I just need calories? Or was it just mental? Could I have lifted myself
out of the doldrums in some other way? Was it the people and their energy
that gave me that lift?
Charlie Loesch, of Santa Fe, NM has loved riding his bicycle for decades. He said that he is something of a character around town because he rides his bike everywhere. Charlie is a contractor and moved to the southwest in the 70's because he was interested in solar energy and housing that required less energy. He still is. He is also finding that he "needs" less than he did years ago. He likes the idea of living simply, conserving energy and resources, and having clean air, and riding a bike fits right in with that philosophy.
38. LaPorte to Kendallville, IN 7/25 Miles 88.9 Total 2553.9
There
were lots of "Twinkies" left over from last night's feast and Nathan made
a special effort today distribute them. He has been sneaking them into big
bags, camping sacks and other spaces surprising riders at various times
during the day. He also managed to convince me to have one of these "treats".
I haven't been missing anything.
The flat farmland we rode through in the morning was easy cycling. Don
made it look even easier on his recumbent. He tells me that they are a
little slower than a regular bike, but on a trip like ours, it's not a
race. The trip is the event, not the destination. 
It's
a trip that Don would not have been able to make three years ago, but
with some surgical work on his feet and the recumbent bike to take the
pressure off his neck, Don has been able to ride for family and friends
with lung disease.
We came through Amish/Menonite country again. We were greeted with free
cookies at a roadside stand. 
In
Topeka (the sign proclaimed "Life In the Past Lane"), Amish buggies lined
up opposite pickup trucks at a farmer's market, and in miles and miles
of cornfields, we found a phone booth. It was just what I needed. I had
not been able to talk with LoAnn for over 10 days while she was out on
her own trip, and I was very anxious to hear her voice. We have not been
apart this long in our married lives and I hope we never are again.
In cycles that seem to require about a hundred thousand years, ice sheets about two miles thick have advanced from the north covering all of Canada, New England, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and large parts of the mid-west. It has been about ten thousand years since people made camp beside the steams of the last melting glaciers here in the northeast corner of Indiana. The land is full of ridges, valleys, lakes, and bogs; boulders are strewn about across the fields. This is the geology of the glaciers, or more exactly, the glacier's retreat. The landscape is composed of geologic exports from Canada; its rock and stone were the cargo that the sheets of ice scoped up in Canada and patiently pushed south. When the climate warmed, the ice melted and dumped its load, trillions of tons of it, as sand, gravel, rocks and boulders. It left a lake that became a park in Kendallville and our stopping place for the day.
--- Paul Fairman, Big Rider #2152.
< pfairman@earthlink.net>