Day 128: A New Year on the Road!

The day before yesterday (July 31st) was the end of our first year on the road.  Fortunately for us, a storm came through late in the afternoon, cooling things off enough that we celebrated with dinner at Torero Mexican Restaurant in Jackson, MO.  With $1.99 12 oz gargamitas (to use an former co-worker's terminology), it was hard not to enjoy our dinner out.  And the dinner portions were more than adequate, so Lana thought waiting in the van was time very well spent.

We crossed into Illinois soon after hitting the road this morning, staying just behind a line of thunderstorms that had passed through earlier.  It is corn harvest time, and we are seeing a lot of harvest trucks on the road, though most have tended to pass only when it is safe to do so.  Alea only rode a total of 21 miles, mostly on roads with adequate shoulders or low traffic volumes.

We camped at Horseshoe Lake Nature Preserve last night ($20, power, water and showers).  There were a ton of sites, but no host and no self-pay facilities (so we ended up staying for free).  The place was empty, except for a woman living in a pickup truck.  But aside from being in a cell reception dead zone, it was a nice enough park, though it is starting to get a bit run down.

We were closer to the Illinois Regional Archives and Depository (IRAD) at Southern Illinois University than we will be at any other point on this trip, so I took some time to drive there and do some family history research (they store public records for the counties of southern Illinois).  I came up empty on the few specific things that I was looking for, but I did manage to get a couple hundred pages of deed records for a book project that I'm working on.  So if things get slow I now have plenty of work to help fill in my time. 

I learned something new today:  the southern 16 counties of Illinois are collectively known as Egypt.  I had heard that before, but figured that it only related to the area at the southernmost tip of Illinois, around Cairo.

Some statistics for the past year:

• We have camped at about 250 different campgrounds.
• We have bicycled around 9,000 miles (roughly 4,500 miles each, but we aren't really keeping track).
• We have passed through 34 different states.
• We have replaced two bicycle wheels.
• We have replaced six bicycle tires.
• We have replaced four bicycle chains.
• We've lost track of how many bicycle tubes we've replaced.
• We have replaced one fuel tank.
• The van has been driven over 24,000 miles.
• We are happier than ever (the most important statistic).

Our favorite states for cycling:

• Oregon (always will be, but we didn't go there this trip).
• Missouri (easy to make up our own routes).
• New York (ditto, possibly even easier).
• Pennsylvania.
• North Carolina.
• Georgia (lots of signed bicycle routes - the way it should be everywhere!).
• Montana (great mix of awesome scenery and good roads, but too damn many rumble strips!).
• Rural Virginia (urban Virginia isn't so great).
• Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine (after all, the three of them together are still smaller than any state out west).

Our least favorite states for cycling:

• South Carolina.  What can I say, it just plain sucked.  The best thing I can say is that it is in between North Carolina and Georgia.
• Mississippi.  Bud Light beer cans grow wild along side the road there.  It took a lot of seeding to make that happen...
• Alabama, where some moron hit me with a bottle of something...
• Does there seem to be some regional commonality here?  I mean other than the loose dogs roaming all over those states...

Our favorite cycling routes (places where we ran into a lot of other cyclists):

• The Katy Trail (Missouri), in spite of the heat.
• The Natchez Trace (Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi).
• (But the Oregon Coast is way better, by orders of magnitude, especially if you are lucky enough to find fair weather).