The First Bad Day

The day started as a Monday. Normally days of the week, dates, and even time make no difference. We have not had a chance to update the blog in a long time, and we just entered eastern time. Today time does something different and we gain an hour? I really have no idea. Regardless, this day started as a Monday.

I was out of it from the beginning. Our first stop was a new breakfast at a Hampton Inn. This was a business a hotel. We are not business men. We silently ate our eggs, toast, and muffins next to man with a finely pressed shirt tucked into his khaki pants. His eyes occasionally strayed from the Wall Street Journal to the television as Jim Cramer babbled about new corporations, the S & P, and inflation. The man was clueless to the fact that his neighbors just slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot, were living out of trailers connected to bicycles, and were about to ride 100 miles to another home yet to be determined. The only thing we had in common was the free breakfast.

We started the ride heading south into a head wind and deeper into the midwest and eventually the south. I could not help but notice the pounds starting to pile up on the people surrounding us with accents thickening. The friendly waives of Nebraska and Iowa slowly turned into dumb looks and disapproval.

My mind quickly entered the dangerous subjects of relationships, friends, debt, jobs, and the other life that I have been ignoring. These are all of the things a person in their mid-20's tries to figure out and probably never will. I usually ride without an ipod, but no ipod turned into one headphone and then eventually to two headphones as the sounds of Band of Horses, Jimi Hendrix, and My Morning Jacket tried to get me through the day.

My mind continued to jump from topic to topic with no real answers. Suddenly, the wind shifted. I thought the funk had ended and maybe the tide had turned. I was wrong. We had just missed all of the places to eat in our lunch town and we were now in the terrible world of car repair, farm machinery, and the last landmark of a town - the landfill. We just road 6 miles in the wrong direction. We had no choice but to ride the same six miles and go back to our turn for a total distance of misc. (or miss) miles.

The day finally ended at a flooded campground on the edge of the Illinois/Indiana border. Surprisingly, we stil managed close to 100 miles. I hoped the next day would be better and the great state of Indiana would bring a better ride.