Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
saddlebags my stuff is staying dry—including the iPad I'm typing this on—and aside
from my head and my hands (the allegedly waterproof gloves I just bought aren't any-
where close), for the most part so am I.
Well, that isn't exactly true. Wearing a rain-repelling Windbreaker may keep out the
weather, but it holds in your body heat, so after fifty or sixty miles, I'm pretty well
drenched anyway. And in this kind of relentless weather, moisture finds every pore in
every surface, and you're just going to be a sponge even if you're better equipped and a
lot smarter than I am.
Regarding being not so smart: Late Wednesday afternoon I crossed the border into
Ohio from Indiana. A few miles in, the road bent downhill and flattened into a perfect
basin, and at the bottom it was underwater for a stretch of maybe fifty feet. The water
overflowed the road, and the grassy shoulder was submerged, too. I couldn't go around.
I was tired, and my GPS had led me on a wild-goose chase to a ghost motel; the place
where the Ramada was supposed to be was a lonely farmhouse in the middle of a vast
soybean field. I was several miles from a shower and something to eat. A drizzle had
just thickened into actual precipitation, beating a steady thrum on my helmet, and as I
stopped before the puddle and watched the drops dotting its surface, I made a hopeful,
lazy bet that it was only three or four inches deep.
That being the case, rather than removing my shoes and walking my bike across, I
figured I could coast through it, holding my pedals parallel to the ground and still keep-
ing my feet above the surface. But I lost the bet in eight inches of water. Both my feet
were submerged as the bike nearly came to a stop halfway through the puddle, and I had
to pedal through the rest, leaving me to ride with soaking feet the last hour of the day.
After a few hours in the saddle on a wet day, I tend to take on a soggy identity. Wet out-
side, wet inside: I'm a wet guy. That's how I think of myself. It's how I present myself to
the motel clerk when I finally arrive at a destination, rolling my bike into the lobby and
dripping on the decorative tile.
“Yes,” I announce, “I'm wet.”
Motel clerks are often sympathetic and helpful—they generally recognize that a first-
floor room is preferable, and one upgraded me to a room with a hot tub—but rarely gif-
ted at repartee.
“Yes sir” is the usual response.
My recent path has taken me through Michiana, as they call it here, the farming re-
gion that exists on either side of the Michigan-Indiana border, and I've been able to
find local maps and local citizens to guide me through rural counties on roads where the
