Oh, so this is what everyone meant when they said I would see corn and lots of it. Have I been mentioning corn a lot lately? So sorry, its just I forget what the rest of America looks like now. I know that there are main interestates through Illinois, I even went to Chicago and saw the city: but that will never be how I remember this state. In fact, I really can’t remember much except the corn. Oh, and the corn. We crossed over into Illinois on day 32 from Madison, WI to Belvidere, IL-just under 100 miles. I forgot to wear my sunglasses on this day and the strain got to my eyes by the end of the day to the point where I was falling asleep on my bike. It was so strange because I felt like I was blinking in slow motion. The roads were pretty terrible so I couldn’t fall completely asleep because my neck was snapping around, but I definitely took a few cat naps. Several of the Big Riders and I noted that there is a reason the state is not pronounced “Illi-noise”. Corn, for the most part, is pretty quiet. The fun part about riding through corn is that it blocks the wind. We took some twisty turvy routes through the state to avoid the interstates and it felt like we were taking part in a gigantic corn maze. This is the part of the ride where we realize just how much we trust our support staff. If its cloudy out, its basically impossible to get any sense of direction in a cornfield and we kept saying “wait, this looks familiar, didn’t we already pass this?, how many miles have we gone?” One day the cue sheet was wrong and we were all halted at the last sag stop while our Mark, a member of the support staff, went out and remarked the route. I had a great time biking because the roads were faily isolated so we had plenty of room to ride alongside each other and chat.
Illinois Stats: Madison, WI to Belvidere, IL 98.6 miles Belvidere, IL to Coal City, IL 102.1, Coal City, IL to Valpairiso IN, 87.4( plus detour = 92miles).
As a side note if you would like a more day to day description of the route, check out Cleanairadventures.org–>Big Ride Across America–> and look at the blogs of Barbara, Diana, Austin, Jim or other riders who have daily access to a computer and thus can keep up a more detailed description.
