Bike America Day 57: More wind power, Sunsets, and RIP Trail Mix

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Day's distance: 67.69 miles

Overall distance: 2,877 miles

Monroeville was the last stop for us on the Northern Tier cycling route. In only a few miles, we’d cross over into Ohio and begin following a set of maps that my mom had acquired from the Columbus Outdoor Pursuits cycling club. First, though, we needed breakfast.

Without much food in the car, my dad and I rode to the dollar general hoping to find fixings for a hearty first meal. We ended up with granola bars, apple sauce, and craisins. We set off a few miles down the road out of town and  turned onto Stateline Road. Indiana was on our left and Ohio on our right but we weren’t sure which state we were in. I said we were either in two places at once or in limbo. We noticed a stark contrast between the many windmills on the Ohio side and the none on the Indiana side. My dad speculated that the tax incentives may be very different in the two states.

We crossed US30 and took a picture with the Ohio sign for insurance. We’d be taking a less-traveled road and weren’t sure if we’d get a state sign. We were pleasantly surprised to see that we did so we took an official picture just before turning out of our no-man’s land and into Ohio.

My dad commented that this was possibly the flattest riding of the entire trip. It was indeed very flat and that made it a little boring. It was made infinitely more interesting when we passed another wind turbine construction site. This time we were really close. My fascination with these things has no end. I mean really, look how massive they are compared to the pick-up trucks and other things on the ground!

We made it to the halfway point in no time. My mom was parked at a little fishing inlet and we sat on bleachers under a pavilion for lunch. I made a peanut butter, nutella, banana and granola sandwich and followed it with a few generous spoonfuls of more nutella for dessert.

During our ride, my dad had declared “I’ve come to a very sad decision. I’m going to have to throw away the trail mix.” Now, my dad is the king of not wasting even a crumb of food. He eats old food and things that have fallen on the floor. Once he even picked old apples that had fallen from a neighbors tree and incorporated them into a meal he made my mom and I, notifying us of his venture afterward. Anyway, this trail mix which we’d been making all summer and of which there was a lot left, had gotten soaked and soggy in the cooler’s melted ice water. During lunch, he said again how much it was eating away at him to throw it all away. He’d been hoping to see a hog farm or something so he could feed it to some animals but, once he saw where we were eating lunch, he decided to dump it in the woods as fertilizer. As he walked away with the bag, I asked if he wanted us all to say a few words. He just went ahead and dumped the thing onto the ground. It was a sad moment for trail mix lovers everywhere.

Against my mom’s wishes, my dad left the car at the fishing inlet and the three of us rode together for a while. He turned around and she and I continued on.

We finished at the school in Rawson, Ohio. We hopped in the car and drove 3 miles south to Twin Lakes Campground, a new KOA establishment with many RVs and no other tents. We set up camp and drove one exit down I-75 to a McDonalds where I ate a McFlurry and spent some time blogging. In a strange way, it felt good to be on I75, the interstate which runs through Gainesville, my other home. After McDonalds, we went back to camp to make our dinner: canned chili and raw veggies.

As the sun set, the view from our campsite was gorgeous. It looked over the little swimming pond and onto a row of pine trees. Just beyond the trees, the cars on the interstate zoomed by and their sound was somewhat soothing. Luckily, the cars weren’t easy to see in the hundreds of photos I took of the sunset.