I always like to do a “shakedown” trip before every bike tour. It’s a two-day ride with a night of camping in between, where the main goal is to “shake” all of our equipment to determine that it’s all ready to withstand the rigors of the road. In the past, an important secondary goal (or maybe it was actually the primary?) was to help get my body up to shape with the back-to-back long rides. 

But this year, we had been so proactive with our fitness training (doing 50+ mile rides every weekend for the whole summer, including a couple back-to-back 67 mile loaded(!) rides in July, and even hitting Rett’s first 100-mile “century” ride) that it truly was the shaking that was the primary goal of this trip. Especially given all the last-minute additions and changes I’d made to our bikes! 

When I lived way out in the suburbs, it was fairly easy to ride from my front door and reach a campground within a day’s ride. That’s much more difficult from our new home in Chicago’s Norwood Park, but luckily the Cook County Forest Preserve had added campgrounds at several of its locations in the previous year. So I would finally have a chance to cash in Rett’s awesome birthday gift to me from the last year: a ride to 3 Floyd’s Brewpub in Munster, Indiana, and an overnight at Shabbona Woods campground. 

The entirely-urban route from the far northwest side of Chicago out the far southeast side isn’t much like real bike touring, but like I said, the riding wasn’t the important part here. We went through a lot of south side neighborhoods that have seen a big spike in violence this year, but on a sunny Saturday afternoon nothing felt particularly sketchy. We rode past a whole lot of shiny, brand-new, and completely-unused Divvy bike-share stations though. 

But then near the Indiana border we hit a trail network that brought us to some nature, including a race with a bounding deer, and a causeway crossing the middle of Wolf Lake. 

Our first visit to 3 Floyd’s was a good one, where the food might have been even better than the beer. And Rett declared their Drunk Monk hefeweizen perhaps the best beer she’d ever had. There were several other groups of cyclists there who made the ride from the city, but all of them were taking the train home. 

We, on the other hand, had about 7 miles to backtrack towards our campground. And as we walked out, one of the most beautiful sunsets we’d ever seen told us we would be doing most of our ride in the dark. Luckily I’d installed Rett’s fancy new  generator light (though not yet my own), and she led the way down the Burnham Greenway trail with light enough for both of us. It was actually a lot of fun, and another element shaken down. 

We turned into the campground and as I expected, there was no longer anyone in the entrance booth, so we just rode over to a campsite with a plan to then see if we could find someone to talk to. But before we could even move, a bright flashlight came charging toward us, and the woman behind it said “What are you doing? You can’t stay here”. She claimed that we needed to have made a reservation, and that reservations needed to be made 48 hours in advance, and we would have to leave. In the black of night. On bicycles. From a nearly-empty campground! Since I had never heard of a reservation-required campground in all my years of camping, I figured we’d be able to turn her around, but she was quite adamant: we had to leave. 

Luckily, her manager came over and straightened her out. It turns out that if *no one* has reserved a site for the night they don’t staff the campground, and then obviously no walk-ups are allowed. This worker had mistakenly extrapolated that to “reservations are required for everyone”. So we were able to pay our $35(!) to spend the night. Thanks to those other campers who had reserved! Otherwise it was a nice campground with brand new facilities, and amazingly quiet and uncrowded for a pre-Labor Day Saturday night. 

The ride home the next morning was uneventful except for the extraordinary number of asshole idiot drivers. We’re ready for this thing! 

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2016 at 1:57 pm and is filed under 2016 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.