Day 35 - June 16th
Crawfordsville, IN to Indianapolis, IN
67.8. miles-official miles
Quote of the day- (borrowed from Donna)
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
-Groucho Marx
"We are now inside the dog"
-Ty
Today we headed toward Indianapolis. Not by a direct means I’m sure. I think we had about 80 turns today. We were about 30 miles from Indianapolis and we biked 64 to get there. Kind of like the Indianapolis 500. We decided to do laps around Indianapolis. I’m might be exaggerating just a wee bit, but not much.
Our rest stop was at a farm outside of Indianapolis. The people were so nice. They even let us use their bathroom in their house. It was nice getting to talk to the farmer about his crops etc. The whole country is starting to go to no till farming. In the old days, farmers use to plow the ground to death. Now they just plant soybeans for example over the old corn crop. They don’t plow or disc or anything to prepare the land. Interestingly, the corn that was growing on the no till side was greener and taller than the crop that was planted on tilled soil. The farmer pointed that out to me. Not only does this preserve the soil from erosion, but it saves diesel fuel. An alumni from a prior tour met us at the farm and gave us miniature Indy 500 flags.
We ate at a little bar in a shopping center where we were once again a tourist attraction. Jim Hall had to stop and get his frappucino, since we didn’t see any Dairy Queens today. He is a two blizzard a day guy and always has his large chocolate milk and donuts in the morning. I think he must have tapeworms or something. Amazing. Jim is a good cyclist (and thin), but if I was on his diet, I’d weigh 300 pounds. And that within 2 months.
Also we visited a velodrome in Indy today. If you don’t know what a velodrome is, it’s kind of like a hippodrome. Guess that didn’t help. I’ll take definitions in English for $200 Alex. OK. A velodrome is a banked track made for bicycle racing. We got to test our skills. The banks are very steep and there is a certain strategy to beating an opponent. We didn’t do that, but I was able to stay on the top of the steep banked wall the entire way. Oh and a hippodrome was a banked oval or stadium used for chariot racing in Greek and Roman times.
We are staying at a Microtel tonight and it isn’t too bad, but it isn’t the Hampton(s). For dinner we are eating at Ruby Tuesdays, so the food tonight will be good. Most of the dinners are well prepared and tasty and do a good job of keeping us all fueled up. I know a friend of mine said their touring company had them eating Chinese buffets 3 nights a week. Now that could create some major problems. All in all the food and the hotels have been good at Crossroads Cycling and the staff has been excellent. Although I enjoy the comic fuel that the bad hotels give me, I’d say overall the hotels and meals have been better than I expected. I think I will do a write-up of the staff one day. They have been amazing.
I have been gone from home so long that I missed Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, my anniversary and now the U.S. Open. I also missed mowing the lawn five times, but I outsourced that since it isn’t one of my core competencies. Summer will be half over when I get home. I appreciate all the great emails I get and I do try to respond to them as best I can. Thanks so much for the support. This has been like any long undertaking. Some days I don’t quite feel like biking, but just a simple email can be so motivational. And thanks to all of the people following me, I get a motivational email almost every day. Thanks a lot. I greatly appreciate it.
Signing off……..
