Day 21: Fremont, OH to Napoleon, OH

Small town justice.

Instead of following the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) route, I decided to take a more direct approach and got on Route 24.  I was  loving this road as soon as I got on it.   The pavement was crazy fast and I was zooming along like speed demon (at least like a very un-aerodynamic speed demon loaded down with forty pounds of gear).  There was a lot of fast-moving traffic, including big trucks, but that didn’t bother me as long as I could maintain the 15 MPH pace I was setting.  The only tricky part was the narrow shoulder.  Most of the roads I ride on have little or no shoulder, but this one was different.  

There was a pretty respectable three feet to the right of the solid white line, but there was a continuous rumble strip gouged into the pavement that extended into the shoulder.  This left me with a band of about 18 inches of rideable road between the jarring rumble strip and the soft shoulder.  Occasionally, my foot and a half would shrink down to about less than 10 inches.  Although it wasn’t a big problem, it did require an extra degree of concentration to stay on the right line and avoid the devastating consequences of straying from the thin margin of safety.   Livin’ on the edge, baby!

During the afternoon, I was cruising along through the corn listening to my iPod.  When I reached for a drink, my hand caught on the headphone wires and yanked the earbuds out.  As they dropped, I realized the wires could get caught in the front tire, which could bring me to a sudden and catastrophic stop.   I slammed on the brakes and did a panic unclip from the pedals, but it was too late.   The wires caught, tangled, and popped.  In the contest between earbuds and rapidly spinning bike tire with lots of weight and momentum, the bike tire wins.  Both the earbuds were sheared off the wires, and lost somewhere in the ditch behind me.  That was the end of my iPod action for the day.  But it turned out to be a good thing (not for my wallet, but for my psyche).

Once I resumed, the wind picked up.   It was blowing out of the north, so it wasn’t causing me any trouble ride-wise.  What it did do was tease its way softly along the tops of the corn stalks, setting the leaves swaying in unison.  This created a gentle rustling that was made more powerful by the cumulative effect of countless accrues each playing its individual part in the symphony.  It was a bit like the wind blowing through the trees back home, but there was a unique quality to the sound of all that corn that was unlike anything I’d heard before.  And I would have totally missed out on it if I hadn’t been lucky enough to accidentally destroy my earbuds.

What I Learned: Don’t waste energy getting upset when things don’t go your way because you just might find that an opportunity for something better has opened up.

Distance Today: 70 miles
Total Distance: 971 miles