47.2 mi / 5:03:50 time / 9.3 mph avg. / 318 ft. climbing
Staying at EconoLodge Motel

Only one more raccoon visit happened overnight, with one sniffing out some plastic bags in Rett’s pannier rain cover. The night was actually oddly quiet; I think the campground overlords control even the behavior of the insects in order to keep the peace.

Today and yesterday felt like some of the most remote sections of bike touring I’ve done outside of the desert southwest; after our second night in a row camping far from any town, we then had another 21 miles to go before the first breakfast opportunity. So we made extra preparations to have first-breakfast provisions on hand (led by a bag of donuts), and they seemed to serve Rett’s morning legs pretty well. A repeat of yesterday, we had mid-70s, low humidity, and sun. And more headwind. We saw about 4 cars in the first hour of riding, several unleashed but not-too-aggressive dogs, we talked with a friendly county sheriff’s deputy, and Rett made her second roadside restroom stop of the trip (the latter two were thankfully unrelated!) At one point where her energy started to flag, it was restored with speed and giant smiles after she got a chance to pet some horsies in a roadside paddock.

After late second-breakfast, we got ice cream a bit later in Swanton, a town made ugly by an outlying highway that clearly destroyed the railroad-centric downtown and replaced that core density with sprawl. Ugh. And that girl honking at us and gesturing angrily in her convertible was pretty ugly too.

Then we got on the Cannonball Trail for 10 miles into Perrysburg. It was smooth, flat, shaded, wind-blocking, and directly on our path. Those are pretty much our criteria for taking a trail over a road, and it was lucky that all this came together here.



Coming into Perrysburg, near the end of the day, with the heat peaking, through some difficult traffic and a difficult intersection, I inadvertently piled on enough to break through Rett’s stress limit. She normally does so well under difficult biking conditions that I sometimes forget how stressful such conditions can actually be for someone biking less than a year. Her rear, while definitely on the mend, likely also added to the stress level.

But we quickly cooled down, and some Internet/phone work got us a $45 EconoLodge room, booked for us by the Quality Inn receptionist against the will of the EconoLodge receptionist, who didn’t want to give us a first-floor room (which makes it a lot easier to roll our bikes inside). Woo hoo! Google pointed out a highly rated independent Mexican restaurant in the sea of chains, and boy, that shrimp+bacon+chorizo+mango inside-a-pineapple thing was my favorite meal so far. It’s very odd to go 5 nights without a trip to a restaurant for dinner, but that’s just how this trip has worked out. So it was nice for Rett to see that campground cooking is not necessarily the standard for my tours. For $45, the motel ain’t the greatest, but it’s better than a tent, made for a relaxing evening, and I’m at least 50% sure we won’t have a raccoon problem!

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