Day 62

Before Normal
I slept in just a bit because the bike shops didn't open until 10. Bad idea. My front tire was flat again. I contemplated pumping it up or just changing it out. I decided to try pumping it up, that way I could replace it with a thorn resistant tube. I tried moving the valve- I'm pretty sure it wouldn't pump up easily before because the valve wasn't in right. I managed to pull it straight off. Well now I know where the leak was coming from. I tried using my path kit to glue it back on, but I could see pretty quickly that that wasn't going to work. I put in a new plain tube, the last of the ones I had at the beginning of the trip. It was pretty easy since I didn't have any gear on my bike. All of this had added more time to getting ready than I had expected though, so I knew I'd be arriving at a bike shop well after 10. I got a bit down the road and realized now would be a good time to call all the bike shops to see if any carried thorn resistant tubes. None that I called did. For some reason I decided to go to the bike shop that picked up but I couldn't understand. On their website, they had a new address posted because they had moved. I put the new address into Google Maps but for some reason it still took me to the old address. Frustrated, I went to the nearest bike shop, 2 miles away. It was really weird- I had called earlier and they said they didn't have any thorn resistant tubes. So I asked for regular tubes, then mentioned the thorn resistant ones. He asked what vavle I had and then said oh yeah, we do have ones, just not with the other vavle. Then he proceeded to bring me two such tubes, both with different valves. What the hell? They weren't the right size, but the guy assured me they would still work. The phone call made sense and made sense of the rest of the phone calls that I had made- bike shops generally have thorn resistant tubes, just not in every size. The reason why this bike shop didn't carry bigger tubes is because they are so thick that they can be a pain to install. I'm guessing that the extra thickness makes them less vulnerable when overinflated. Still, it blows my mind that these places call themselves bike shops and yet they don't even have the right tubes. Finally I left. It was annoyingly late by now, and I still needed food and water. I found a water fountain along the bike path and food at a gas station. The bike path continued along the Route 66 that I was used to. I only had a bit of road before I turned off and started heading east. This is where I really started to take off- I wasted a ton of time in Bloomington so I wanted to try to make up for it. I only had short dirt roads to go over, the rest were paved. Cars rarely passed me. At one point there was a huge flock of birds. Some were on the power lines, some in the corn fields, even more took up the road. It was a lot of fun to bike through that. There was also a bunch of yellow butterflies. I didn't see them until the last second, so I rode close enough to disrupt them. I hope I didn't run over any. I had to avoid caterpillars in the road all day. I made incredibly good time- for a good part of the day I was averaging about 10mph. I made it to Havana, the only city for today, a bit before 8, right after sunset. I restocked at a gas station and was back on the road, looking for a place to camp. I went over a huge river- there should been plenty of trees to hide behind. The road followed a canal though. Once it appeared to move away from the water, there was a guardrail blocking me. I kept going until I finally found a road. It was a huge field of corn, surrounded by trees. I avoided the trees near where I came in because it was still close to the highway and there were noisy birds. I found a place that looked like it had been bulldozed- probably to make more room for crops. Maybe I could have found a better spot. I decided that the chances of me sleeping through a bulldozer approaching my tent, the person in the bulldozer not seeing me, and the bulldozer coming tomorrow morning in the first place were slim. I guess we shall see!