Thursday, July 02, 2009

Day 17: Indianapolis, IN to Terre Haute, IN

In keeping with what we'd decided the night before, we were up and out of bed before 5. Although the free hotel breakfast didn't start until 5:30, the friendly man working the desk got breakfast started early for us. This cemented La Quinta as one of our favorite hotels forever and ever. We ended up getting on the road at about 5:30, while it was still very dark.

This was probably for the best though. Riding on 21st street we passed a lot of abandoned houses and sketchy neighborhoods. We took 21st street to Massachusetts, which we followed into town. Though it was a weekday, traffic at dawn remained light, offering us lots of opportunities to shoot photos of town.

We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of cycling lanes downtown, but when we were on them it was only an accident. We hadn't planned a route that took advantage of cycling lanes at all. When we did get downtown, we stopped and Jillian wandered about, shooting pictures with her big camera instead of the little point and shoot she kept at ready all the time.

After crossing the river and traveling down the White River Parkway, we rejoined US-40 to get out of town. A lot of this road seemed to be through a Hispanic neighborhood, and I tried to teach Jillian some Spanish. She ended up saying things like "La Mono grande come los ninos", which roughly translates to "The big monkey eats the children." Just before we crossed I-465 again (this time on the west side of town), we stopped at a Kroger for breakfast and supplies.

Usually we take turns going into a store, and I'm usually the one to go in first. As I was in the store buying some donuts Jillian talked with a number of people on their way into the store who were curious about the bike. By the time it was Jillian's turn to go into the store we'd become minor celebrities, and it took Jillian forever to get through the store because of the number of people who stopped to talk to her about the funny looking bike out front.

This meant we didn't leave the Kroger until traffic had really picked up. So there was more not so fun riding along 40 until Plainfield, where we stopped for a bathroom break. This involved talking with even more local people who were curious about the bike, which was really cool. Talking to random people along the way has become one of the most fun parts of this trip.

One constant task is finding bathrooms. Often we try to find the first and the last gas station in town, so that we have to go as few miles as possible between towns, where there are no bathrooms at all. Jillian tried to ask another woman in line if there was anything further up the road, but the woman responded "Oh, I have no idea. I'm from Indy." We both found this really interesting, since we were less than 10 miles from the beltway and less than 20 miles from the center of downtown. In the DC area it seems like people have a pretty good idea of what's around the outside of town, in the midwest it seemed like there were city people and there were country people. Country people knew the area, traveled a lot, and were very friendly. City people seemed to stay locked away in their cities, never getting more than a few miles from their home unless it was by plane.

A few hours later we stopped in Stilesville for lunch, after riding through absolutely nothing at all. We went to the only restaurant in town, Cornerstone Pub. It was standard bar fare, but the food was good and it felt great to get out of the heat.

On our way out of Stilesville we started talking about when we'd make it to Terre Haute. The night before Jillian had been reading tourism magazine and had seen a lot of things to do in Terre Haute. She decided that she really wanted to make it there in time to see their art museum. When the winds started to change direction and it no longer felt like a headwind, we really picked up the pace. We flew along the road, trying to make it before the 5. This led me to get rather frustrated, because Jillian had earlier made me promise to not have any more "deadline days" like we'd had in Bedford.

But only two nights earlier we'd had a long talk about why we were doing the trip, and if we were going to do the trip at all. One of the things we'd decided was that we needed to experience more things along the way. Since we had the wind and Jillian was pedaling really hard, I rode hard with her without too much complaint. We made it to Terre Haute with less than half an hour to spare. Jillian got off the bike and ran inside to tour the gallery, while I stayed outside to guard the bike (Art isn't really my thing).

Fortunately the art gallery rejuvenated Jillian, and we left the gallery in a much better mood. Our next stop was Fat Bikes, where we hoped someone would be able to look at our shaky headset.

Sadly, we had no luck. The shop mechanic had never seen anything quite like our bike and didn't think we'd have any luck ever finding someone to fix it. Not a good sign, but the shaking wasn't getting worse much faster. We'll be taking a day off in St Louis, so if we're lucky we'll find someone to fix it there.

Then we went about finding a hotel. The hotels in downtown Terre Haute are very overpriced, so we went to the south end of town, where most of the chain hotels are. A lot of the hotels in the area had rather mediocre reviews, so we decided to try a few higher end places (read "medium priced") first. When we stopped at the Comfort Inn Suites and inquired about a price the desk clerk asked us what we were willing to pay. After a very brief negotiation we got an awesome ground floor suite for 30% off. Since we'd managed to make our goal - the art museum before 5, and get a much nicer hotel room than we'd planned on, things were looking up. Maybe we would make it to St Louis and beyond after all. We grabbed dinner at Lonestar, where I took advantage of their free refill lemonades and had a ridiculous amount to drink, and then crashed.

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