100th Day & 100 Miles: Avon, OH

We headed out today thinking we would together ride a total of 96 miles, to just past Avon Lake, OH, and from there drive a few miles south to our planned campground.  But I got pretty twisted around in Cleveland and added enough mileage to today's total that we managed to log our first 100 mile day, doing so on our 100th day of this year's travels:  Alea rode two shifts totaling a bit more than 46 miles, and my two shifts totaled just over 54 miles.

We had two main goals for today: the first was to get through Cleveland during the holiday, when traffic is lighter, the second was to get far enough down the road to minimize the number of private campgrounds that we might need to stay at along a two hundred mile stretch of Lake Erie shoreline.  

A conveyor crossing a Lake Erie inlet.

A rare unimpeded view of Lake Erie.

Camp Wahoo ($20, power and showers), may be the poster child for the reason for our second goal.  The owner is nice enough, but this place is up for sale, likely because everything is too far gone to think about putting any more money into keeping things going.  Clearly, bubble gum and baling wire are what is keeping things together, but at least the showers and toilets work, and the water is actually hot when you want it that way.  We are quite happy that we at least could wash off the sweat and salt from today's ride.

The shower house seems to be the main power distribution hub for the campground.

Lately we've been reading about RVing in Baja, Mexico, so in some regards this gives us a preview of coming attractions, should those plans come to fruition.  From what we've read thus far, this place has a lot of similarities to some of the campgrounds down south (except that in Mexico there is no vegetation in many of the desert campgrounds).

Cleveland waterfront.

Part of the waterfront bicycle trail.

It is interesting that we picked a departure date for this year's cycling that put our 100th day on the road on the Fourth of July (we certainly didn't plan that).  After a long day's ride we were hoping to find a local Mexican restaurant for dinner, but we weren't optimistic because of the holiday.  We called a half a dozen restaurants of various sorts in the area before finally finding one that was open: Istanbul Grill.  And we lucked out.  The food was incredible and the staff was very hospitable.  We had the Sultan's Delight (a lamb and vegetable dish) and the Istanbul Signature (filet mignon with cracked wheat and vegetables)  We can certainly understand what made the Sultan so happy, and it is hard not to have a great meal that includes filet mignon, if the chef has any skill at all.

We met another young couple toward the end of today's ride: Chuck and Kate.  They are freewheeling a route to Oregon, and were thinking of riding from Pocatello to Boise.  I suggesting that if the wind was blowing the wrong way that it would be less effort to ride through the mountains.  They took that under advisement and will no doubt ponder some alternatives to crossing the Snake River Plain.