We woke up pretty early this morning and went through our morning routine. Before leaving Peotone, we stopped at McDonald's to fill up on water again. We rode on a lot of country roads during the day; one of which ended up having a lot of semi-truck traffic on it. There was not much of a shoulder, and some of the trucks didn't give us any room. I was shaking for most of the time we were on that road from being thrown around by the wind and the suction from the semi's. We took the first right possible to get off of that road. After riding for about 20 miles, we rode through a little town called Manhattan. They even had a little area that they called "Time Square" which was neat. Shortly after that we rode into the city of Joliet, where we planned to go out for lunch. We rode around the city for a little bit trying to find a good place to eat. There was a little restaurant that served primarily chicken and fish, and homemade buttermilk biscuits, that we decided to go to. The food was melt in your mouth good! We continued on for a little while and stopped at McDonald's to use the internet to check for Warm Showers before we completely left the city. To our surprise, there was a host that was somewhat close and in the direction we were heading. We were not all that sure that we would be able to make it there, but we figured we would give it a try. The weather today was hotter that it was yesterday, and it was about 84 degrees then. I saw a sign that said it was 87 degrees. The sun was very warm and it was pretty windy, which made the ride towards our hosts house tough. However, once we finally turned North to head towards Somonauk, the wind was at our backs and it was smooth sailing from there. We rode into Newark, IL which was neat because there is a Newark close to Joey's hometown. The girl at the gas station gave us excellent directions on the best way to get where we were going, and even gave us a little map which she highlighted the route we could take. She was very helpful. As we continued down the road, we rode through Sandwhich, which was the hometown of our last Warm Showers host. Three miles later, we arrived in Somonauk. We reached our destination around 7pm. After nice hot showers, we enjoyed dinner out with our hosts. Cliff and Sue took us to a local pizza shop, since we hadn't had pizza in such a long time. The pizza was delicious! For the entire evening we enjoyed conversations about trips we had done, ones they had been on and even discussed the possibility of them meeting us somewhere on our trip to ride with us for a week or so. That would be SO fun!! Before bed, we each had a glass of OJ to replenish our system a little, and a nice big bowl of mint ice cream! We were so glad that we made it to a Warm Showers today, especially since it looked like it was really far away on the map. We rode 71.09 miles today.
|
|