Day 29, Monday, July 28.
Kewanee, IL to Kankakee, IL
Daily Mileage: 131.63 miles
Total Mileage: 2,715.4 miles
Daily Time on Bike: 8:38 hours
Average Speed: 15.2 mph
Maximum Speed: 27.6 mph
We began week five of our journey today. Five weeks of biking, and it’s all we’ve know right now—wake up every morning, roll up our tent, pack our bikes, eat breakfast, and start down the road to see what new, interesting and sometimes annoying things wait for us. We traveled a great 131 miles today with much of today’s adventure lying in our destination city, and I will never forget it.
We rolled into Kankakee, IL late in the evening. We talked with a man filing up his tank as we were stopped at a gas station on the edge of town trying to find a place to eat and camp. He told us of a trio of cyclists last week that were also doing a cross-country bike trip. As they were cresting a hill in the early morning, an oncoming trucker was blinded by the sunlight as he crested the hill and ended up hitting and killing one of the cyclists. It wasn't exactly what we wanted to hear. Actually it's not something that we will rush to tell our parents. With this depressing, and startling news, we headed for the nearest Pizza Hut.
While inside the restaurant, we started talking to a young couple just finishing their dinner. They asked us the standard trip questions and then where we intended to sleep. We told them how we usually find a campsite after dinner, and then the gentleman, who happened to be a police officer, said he would go next door to the fire station and see if we could camp there. A while later he came back and said everything was all set. David and I couldn't believe it. We were camping at a fire station.
After dinner, we rode our bikes over to the station and introduced ourselves. Once we had our tent set up, we went back inside to chat with the firefighters. They were the nicest guys. We hung out and talked until 1AM. We got their address so that we could mail them postcards from the coast when we finally made it, and they took our addresses so they could mail us Kankakee Fire Department t-shirts (which I still have and cherish as one of my only mementos from the trip).
(Photo: David and I posing with the Kankakee Fire Department truck.)
Daily Mileage: 131.63 miles
Total Mileage: 2,715.4 miles
Daily Time on Bike: 8:38 hours
Average Speed: 15.2 mph
Maximum Speed: 27.6 mph
We began week five of our journey today. Five weeks of biking, and it’s all we’ve know right now—wake up every morning, roll up our tent, pack our bikes, eat breakfast, and start down the road to see what new, interesting and sometimes annoying things wait for us. We traveled a great 131 miles today with much of today’s adventure lying in our destination city, and I will never forget it.
We rolled into Kankakee, IL late in the evening. We talked with a man filing up his tank as we were stopped at a gas station on the edge of town trying to find a place to eat and camp. He told us of a trio of cyclists last week that were also doing a cross-country bike trip. As they were cresting a hill in the early morning, an oncoming trucker was blinded by the sunlight as he crested the hill and ended up hitting and killing one of the cyclists. It wasn't exactly what we wanted to hear. Actually it's not something that we will rush to tell our parents. With this depressing, and startling news, we headed for the nearest Pizza Hut.
While inside the restaurant, we started talking to a young couple just finishing their dinner. They asked us the standard trip questions and then where we intended to sleep. We told them how we usually find a campsite after dinner, and then the gentleman, who happened to be a police officer, said he would go next door to the fire station and see if we could camp there. A while later he came back and said everything was all set. David and I couldn't believe it. We were camping at a fire station.
After dinner, we rode our bikes over to the station and introduced ourselves. Once we had our tent set up, we went back inside to chat with the firefighters. They were the nicest guys. We hung out and talked until 1AM. We got their address so that we could mail them postcards from the coast when we finally made it, and they took our addresses so they could mail us Kankakee Fire Department t-shirts (which I still have and cherish as one of my only mementos from the trip).
(Photo: David and I posing with the Kankakee Fire Department truck.)
