a day off in Columbus

After a great visit with Drew's parents, we left Terre Haute for a pretty ride to Greenfield, Indiana. That morning, we rode through some pretty dense fog, which was somewhat nervewracking in terms of our visibility to cars, but was beautiful. We rode through an area of cornfields scattered with farmhouses that had an eerie shadow cast over them by the rising sun and the moisture in the air. We attempted to take pictures, but they didn't really capture the light very well. By 8:30 or so, the fog had blown off, and the rest of our day was beautiful and sunny. In the early afternoon, we rode right through downtown Indianapolis. It was cool to see another city, and notice the unique aspects of each of the cities we have ridden through.

The next morning, we set off toward Columbus, where we are currently visiting Drew's friend from college, Claire. Our initial goal was to split the 150 miles in to two 75 mile days, but we had a great wind at our tail, and we had ridden nearly 50 miles by 11am. So, we decided to push on and head, crossing the Ohio border, and finish in Springfield, Ohio instead. The final mileage for the day was nearly 115, which was a long day even though it was relatively flat with good winds.

It's a good thing that we pushed on towards Springfield, because we woke up yesterday morning with only 45 miles ahead of us to Columbus! Also, there were strong storms in the forecast for the afternoon. When we first woke up, there were some pretty crazy thunder storms rolling through, but they had passed by the time we finished breakfast. Aside from a strong crosswind, we didn't see many other signs of a storm, so we set on our way. We made good time to Columbus, and we rode into town around noon. We managed to avoid rain all morning until about 3/4 a mile away from Claire's house, when we were hit with some really hard rain. We were soaked in seconds! Even still, we were glad to be done so early in the day with a full day and a half ahead of us to relax.

Yesterday afternoon and today have been a great time to relax. We all went to see Food, Inc. with Claire and her roomate, and spent the evening relaxing. This morning, we cooked a feast of a breakfast and explored a bit of Columbus while looking for a bike shop. We went to an ice cream shop with really exotic flavors (like salty caramel, goat cheese and cherries, thai chili, cucumber honeydew ceyenne, berry and burgundy, sweet corn and rasberry). We tried them all...they sound bizarre, but were really yummy! This evening, we will head over to the 'ribs and jazz festival' that is taking place in Columbus.

We're working out our route for the rest of the trip. We're a bit south of last year's crew, but we will try to meet up with their route to avoid the Appalacians in Pennsylvania. Right now, our estimated date to arrive in Farmington is somewhere around August 4th or 5th! We're all getting antsy to see family and friends again!