Day 25 – Reflection

Indianapolis, IN – Cloverdale, IN

6/5/11

Ate breakfast at what seemed to be the kind of diner in cities that get a reputation if for nothing else than for its longevity. Looked like it had been around for a while, did Peppy’s Diner. I had a fascinating conversation with Vicky a woman, in her late 50’s, sitting at the next little booth, facing me. As has become standard and appreciated, people’s natural sense of curiosity kicks in when a guy on a bike with a trailer wearing a jersey sits down and eats. Vicky struck up the conversation and it snowballed because she is thankfully a critical thinker and well informed.

The brief rain in the morning helped to cool of the day. As I have been doing, I blindly let Google Maps take me around this imaginary boundary as it sees fit. There have been times where it will take me down a road and then have me turn around to continue on the road that I was just on in the same direction. It doesn’t say it in those terms of course so it is not obvious during an initial glance of checking out the directions. Today it happened in a way that was unsettling. Typically it is only like a mile at max when google has it’s u-turn complex. This time it was about 5 miles on a really back woods road with trailer parks and questionable looking houses with rusted out automobiles a plenty.  As I was making the pathetic back tracking and approaching a very steep hill that I was enjoying coming down about a half hour earlier, a medium sized black dog came sprinting and barking to the road across his owner’s 3-4 acre front yard. This alerted the neighbors dog, a pit bull of a generous size, in which he or she too joined the race. The natural reaction is to just pedal faster. This happened just prior to the base of a formidable hill and biking while pulling a trailer results in a lack of an ability to accelerate and couple that with a hill and there is no way to out pedal a dog or two. The scenerio was such that they had a ways to go to get to the road so I was pedaling like a fool in the vein attempt to pick up speed, looking ahead, looking back at the dogs as they got closer, looking ahead, back at the even closer dogs. They got almost up to the rear tire of the bike, certainly parallel with the trailer and I was screaming at them to “Back OFF, Stop, Go Home,” you name it. Miraculously they backed off just as the ascent up the hill started. I guess I had gotten far enough away from their territory to satisfy them. The surge of energy expended plus the hill made me have to stop and push the bike up after catching my breath as this instance was the first time during the trip that I was concerned for my own safety. It was humbling to be pushing up a bike and trailer up a really steep hill with cars passing you.

I made it to Quincy, IL but the only building other than houses was a post office and the people that I spoke to there could care less about me. It was decided to got to Cloverdale, about 9 miles away and get a room.