Day 3

Still a little Lost
The roads around the Illinois River just do not go straight like all the other ones in the state. We finally just gave up and took this big highway 23. It is a state road which actually goes all the way up to Gene's town of Polo. After a while I noticed that I was still losing air out of my tire, but there were no towns that had bike shops. We wanted to get across the river to Princeton, but there were no bridges across the river either.

We stopped in this small town where there just happened to be a county sheriff's department. We asked an officer about a bike shop and a bridge. He told us that the interstate was the safest way across the river. Now I was a little confused by this statement, but I have been told not to argue with certain figures of authority. So, we rode out to the entrance ramp and, sure enough, there was a sign that read "Non Non-motorized Vehicles." We considered our options and decided to run with it. I don't generally recommend riding on the interstate-not too scenic for one thing. But some states actually allow it in places where there is no good alternative. That was the case here. Anyway, we were only on it for about three miles and traffic was pretty light as well. It was a good rush.

BikeWorks
Mike Welte at the BikeWorks Shop set me straight on tubes. I had a little piece of something that was stuck in my tube, which would run me low, until I got a pinch flat. I was patching the pinch flats, but the slow leak was still there. Mike also recommended that I get a better pump so that I could actually get my tire up to a good 110psi. BikeWorks is a pretty cool shop which sells both Trek (for me) and Schwinn (for Gene).
Extra Miles
After that, my bike seemed to just glide along. Gene seemed pretty intent on getting home tonight, a half-day ahead of schedule, so we just kept on hauling. We had some help from the wind too for a while. We stopped for a quick sandwich in Dixon and kept on peddling into the dusk. We started to get a pretty strong EAST wind which slowed us down considerably. It was hard to run even a decent drafting paceline. We made it into his house just as it was getting dark and cool, and just as the odometer flipped over to 100.