25 August 2010 – Last night during an internet session I found the 60-mile Great River Trail from Savanna IL to the Quad Cities. I found this to be a flat paved path, mostly bike trails, but some county roads and I did most of the trail, with my mood elevated most of the time. Did 40+ miles in three hours. From our stopping point we drove around the Quad Cities to the Iowa side of the river, hoping that Iowa (it is the RAGBRAI state) had state roads with adequate shoulders. No go, but I did find a combination of roads that will take us down to Burlington, so tomorrow is set. Doing so took the better part of four hours because first you have to find the roads before you check them out. Two particular things struck my fancy. First, I was riding along the top of a levee, perhaps two miles long, higher than all the surrounding terrain (it’s a levee) of swamps and rivers, short cropped grass on both sides, the sun on me so I was starting to get warm. My eyes, as usual, were mostly focused some yards ahead to avoid pitfalls but they caught sight of some graffiti painted on the path. I looked down just in time to read “Ain’t life grand?” I had to smile – it was and is the only graffiti I have seen to date. The second notable item was the Thomson prairie. Grasses and plains plants 3-4 feet tall in all directions. How did those first settlers get across such expanses?
Once my brother Rick and I walked across Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail. We were not what one would call backpacking purists. We averaged about 9 miles a day, while others we talked to on the trail were doing 15-20, and one little guy whose name I forget was doing 40, miles per day. Observation and questioning revealed the source of the discrepancy between their distances and our own. At the end of the day we would spend about two to three hours setting up the tent, putting out our stuff, cleaning up, preparing the dinner, eating, and cleaning dishes. To get this done before dark we usually stopped about 4 pm. Others stayed on the trail and hour longer. In the morning, we often heard other backpackers bteaking camp in the dark and found them gone at first light, which in the mountains is not all that light. Such activities would rouse us and we might go out to pee, but the thought of getting out of the warm sleeping bag into the cold air of the tent which was many degrees warmer than the outside was just too much. We eventually settled on a rule of thumb if the tent was warm enough to get out of the sleeping bag without feeling cold, then it was time to get up. That was usually between 9:30 and 10 am. Of course then we had to have our bacon and eggs (freeze dried) or pancake breakfast with (powdered) OJ and real filtered coffee. And then we’d finally get back to packing, and then we’d hit the trail. Lunch, about three hours later was another 1-1.5 hour unpacking, preparing, packing diversion from walking. All told we usually managed a good 4.5 hours walking each day. That backpacking experience shares a lot of similarities with this bike trip. There are the morning and evening packing experiences – about an hour and a half all told – plus, something we didn’t do much on the well-marked Pacific Crest Trail, looking for a way forward that is deemed safe and non stressful (Trucks rushing by at 70 mph on a 55 mph highway are not distressing events, so I seek to minimize them at every opportunity).
The other unplanned for activity is laundry. At home I go through seven shirts, pairs of socks and underwear plus one pair of pants a week. My laundry was a one-load, once-a-week affair. However, when you are going through 7-8 shirts a day plus other garments and you only brought 14 shirt, laundry is an every other day affair. You don’t need much imagination to see how important it is to find motels with a washer and dryer.
Thought for the day: You have to think of packing and unpacking and doing laundry as one of life’s little pleasures, otherwise every day you’re going to be bummed out.
Reply to Geoff: Thanks for the encouragement.
Reply to Taffy: I will say hi to Dad. WRT the Tour, if you read all the blogs, starting with the first the story is more or less told there.
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