Harrisburg, IL to Gun Creek, IL
43.3 mi, 1,195 ft elevation
Today was a welcomed short ride. We did a staggered leave from Brad and Sherie’s home. I was the last to leave and had the chance to chat with Sherie about her cross-country bike journey.
She showed me the Shutterfly scrapbook compiling her and her husband’s blog posts (which reminds me — a great project to implement for Spokes at the end of the summer).I teared up at the last chapter. There is a silly selfie of them eating lobster and blueberries in Maine after their last ride. Brad is holding one claw, Sherie is staring dead-pan into the camera. A life partner is a good, good friend to fight mountains together, then share a beer with afterwards. True romance is friendship dressed in a rain poncho, tanned to a burnt crisp.
We pulled into the town of Benton, 7-miles from our campsite, at around 11 am. Now that my stomach’s settled, I began catching up on milkshakes. I treated myself to a chocolate concrete shake. We camped out at The Buzz, a coffee shop where we met nearly all the locals! A few members of our team even met the mayor, who used to own a bike shop. Meanwhile, I was folded on a couch, exhausted. If there’s a surface, I have a responsibility to sleep on it.
We went to an antique shop. Here, Hank explored new (gilded) helmet options, we found unopened glass Coke bottles from the late 1980s, and I flipped through MAD magazines. Antique shops are a great love of mine. Though Spokes has corrected lots of my hoarding tendencies (I enjoy the simple functionality of this type of packing), let me flirt with the other side. These shops are collections of items too precious to do away with. Someone somewhere left a well-loved set of corn-themed dish ware. Basketballs carved as Jack O’ Lanterns. I can’t wait to have my own home someday and decorate my coffee tables with small ceramic animals, my walls with paintings from local artists. A blue tinted vase will sit on every table.
We eventually moved to the other side of town to work at the library. There, we found a Reading Garden (with an exceptionally large Berenstain Bear chair) and a pirate structure play-structure! Ay-ay, Captain Rebecca. And of course, who could forget the metal porpoise that greets you inside the library? The staff very kindly offered us soda, lemonade, and cookies to fuel our blogging and route-planning.
We arrived at Gun Creek Campground. JD slammed-dunked on this site booking. We were next to the lake. Cannonballs were in order. Turns out, the temperature we felt through our bike ride was also boiling the water. We were swimming in a cauldron of warm soup.
Tomorrow, we have a century to look forward to (106 miles in 104° temperature). So, after a dinner of Kraft Mac n Cheese and frozen meatballs, we began with bike maintenance and packed sandwiches for the early leave tomorrow. We wanted to sleep by 9 pm.
In the middle of degreasing my bike chain, I caught a glance of the lake at sunset. I abandoned my cloth and started for the rocks. I sat on the banks for a while. A bird flew across the lake. Its shadow moved like a frisbee across a quilt of blue and orange.
My favorite poem is written by Peter Chinman. I made a short correction:
He thought the dogs were chasing lemons
across the lawn until you told him about tennis
see [Illinois] before you die kid
it’s worth it the sunsets
I’ve spoken to my Mom a lot recently about suffering — yeah, I know dramatic — and about whether it’s necessary. So much of life is spent with your back to beauty, running, in hopes that one day you’ll earn it. But here’s a secret. When you see something beautiful, stay with it.