Saturday, July 04, 2009

Day 19: Greenup, IL to Effingham, IL

As excited as we were to be riding another short day, we also really didn't want to get out of bed. It was raining. It rained the entire time we were on the bike, all thirty miles to Effingham. Nothing interesting happened, it was just cold and wet.

But once we got to Effingham we quickly found our way to a coffee shop. Once there we talked with a group of mountain bikers who had hoped to get a ride in, but decided to stop at the coffee shop due to the rain. When they heard about our shaky handlebars, one of them said he'd love to take a look for us. It turns out that Chad had been a professional mechanic for a number of years in St Louis. While he'd never seen a headset quite like ours before, he knew what he was looking at. After grabbing a pipe wrench from his friend's truck, he proceeded to fix our problem right there. The difference was night and day. All we needed was a standard headset wrench, and then we'd be able to fix it ourselves. You just loosen the clamp at the bottem, loosen the allen bolt, then hand tighten a nut inside the headset. It takes about three minutes.

After the mountain bikers left (Chad is on the left) left, we sat at Joe Sippers for the rest of the day. Jillian and I alternated between reading Lance Armstrong's It's Not About the Bike and blogging. It was warm, the coffee was good, and they didn't mind that our stuff was dripping water everywhere.

The first man we met at the coffee shop (and who initially introduced us to the mountain bikers) also called the local paper, so we gave an interview as well. They wrote up a very nice article all about us, and were even nice enough to send copies of the paper to our house and to our parents. The reporter also let us know that the 4th of July festivities were likely to get canceled due to rain, which made us sad, but we were expecting.

By late afternoon it was time to check into the hotel, so we found a break in the rain and rode to the relative luxury of the Hampton Inn. Since we had some extra time we even did laundry before having dinner at the Texas Roadhouse. Although the service wasn't as good as the Texas Roadhouse in Terre Haute, the refills on lemonades were still free, and that was all that mattered. Since there weren't going to be any fireworks, we got to bed early.

Effingham looked like a pretty awesome town, we were sad that we only got to explore during the rain. We were also sad that it was in Southern Illinois - neither one of us is ready to move to the midwest.

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