Day 24: Emancipation

The B&B had sent me off with an omelette and bacon that hit every mark a body could ask for, which was fortunate, because today we finally meant to reach Illinois — a border I’d been chasing since yesterday and hadn’t caught. Twelve easy miles brought us to the water’s edge, Michael catching up to ride with us along the way. German-born, twelve years in the States by now, and about the friendliest man on the whole ACA roster. At the Ohio River there was no bridge to speak of, only a shuttle ferry, and the river itself doing double duty as the line between Kentucky and Illinois.

Joe had been promising all week that he’d swim it — he was a swimmer, an Ohio boy, this was practically his home water — and true to his word he peeled off from the group as we wheeled our bikes onto the ferry, slipping down to the bank to find his spot. We watched him lower himself in as the boat pulled away. The crossing takes about a minute by engine. By the time we stepped off the far side his head was a dot, and shrinking, dragged well downstream of where he’d started. There was a bad half-minute of nobody saying anything before we spotted him hauling himself up onto the bank a good half-mile down, wading through mud and sand thick enough to keep a man honest, while the rest of us stood there and laughed at him without an ounce of shame.

Show over, we rode through Cave In Rock and found the sign we’d come for — Illinois, state number three. It was shaping up to be a scorcher, so we’d built the day around beating the heat: ride hard in the morning, sit out the worst of the midday sun, finish up in the cool of the evening. Twenty more miles put us in Elizabethtown, where we ate at one more home-cooking café before doing the thing that felt most like re-entering civilization after Kentucky — walking into a bar. Dogs tied up outside instead of running loose, the roads swept clean, and cold drafts served in glasses frosted enough to fog in your hand. On a day like this one, it was close to a religious experience.

State No.3

Jenks House

E-Town as the locals called it.

Back on the road, we pointed ourselves toward Eddyville and the campsite we’d marked for the night, working through a string of climbs that were long rather than steep but drained us all the same. We rolled in as evening settled — forty-eight miles logged by then, the running total edging past eleven hundred — to find the campground sat a mile off the route itself, which left us a choice: set up first and ride back into town for food, or eat first and find our tents in the dark. We went with the dark. It turned out to be the right call.

The place was full of horse people making use of the trails, and it smelled like it — even the showers carried a note of stable, though nothing a tired cyclist couldn’t live with, especially at fourteen dollars a site split four ways. I washed the day off, crawled into the tent, and was gone before I knew it.