Omaha to NYC Day 13: Chicagoland
Animated map: https://www.relive.com/view/vMv8zQ25EN6
SOFAUS 3 Day 13
The night was what you’d expect. Hot and sticky with the occasional whining “Nee” of a mosquito in my ear. I slept better than I thought I would, but that isn’t saying much. Around 3:30 I woke up and couldn’t sleep for about an hour. Finally, I closed my eyes. It felt as if no time passed, but when my eyes opened again it was almost 6:00. Thank goodness for small mercies.
I decided to skip breakfast, what with the bugs and all. I was on the road just after 6:30 headed to Joliet. The soft early morning light made the trail glow and the breeze of just moving through space made this a magical time.
The reverie ended in Rockdale just south of Joliet. The trail ends and, as I was warned by the firefighter in Spring Valley, the roads suck. There are two ways to go: the less bad way and the bad way. Luckily, neither is very long. I turned onto the less bad way only to see that a train was parked across the road. Who knew how long that thing would be there. I took the bad way. It was a four lane on my old friend US 6. Thankfully, the traffic was light enough that cars could change lanes to avoid me. I pedalled hard and breathed a sigh of relief as I turned off US 6.
Now, I was in Joliet. I took side streets to its small downtown. As I rode I wondered what happened to Jean, a Peace Corps volunteer in my group. She was from Joliet, but we lost touch. I found a nice coffee shop / deli called Jitters. It combined great coffee with Joliet’s blue collar vibe. A ton of people came in to place deli orders for later in the day. Interesting model. They didn’t have ham because their distributor messed up. I guy my age complimented my rig. I enjoyed the downtime.
I needed to make my friend Asif’s place in Oak Brook. It was only about 20-25 miles away so I took a short side trip to see the old Joliet prison of Blue Brothers fame. For guys of a certain age who lived in or even near Chicago, the movie is a touchstone. It was, interestingly, also a cult classic in Germany when I did my junior year of college in Freiburg. It played every weekend at a college second run theater.
The prison is in a Hispanic part of town. I thought about stopping a bakery, but I was already full. Soon I was at the prison’s iconic East gate that opens the movie. I snapped couple of pictures, noted that the area is more developed that it seems in the movie, and rode back to the place where the I&M starts again after getting blotted out by Joliet for a couple of miles. Except it isn’t really the I&M at this point, it is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal which was built to carry Chicago’s wastewater into the hinterlands instead of into Lake Michigan where Chicago gets its drinking water. It reversed the flow of the Chicago River to do so. I bet the folks along the canal loved this change.
From Joliet, the trail surroundings alternate between rural and industrial. Where the trail meets I-355, part of a ring system around Chicago, I turned north on bike paths. I started seeing huge distribution warehouses, the harbinger of all modern urban areas. Then there were huge six lane roads, luckily I still had a bike path. Still, it was a shock even if I knew it was coming. A stiff headwind blew from the north. It slowed me, but it brought clouds to mitigate the heat. I was pretty beat from three days of heat indexes about 105. I stopped at a coffee shop / lunch place. Most of the people working there or eating there spoke a slavic language.
After that it was suburban streets of the winding or stroad variety. It was hard riding after the freedom of the rural backroads with hardly a stop light. I had to ride the sidewalks in places and chaffed at the Push to Walk AKA ‘beg’ buttons. I made slower progress than I thought, but was at Asif’s by 1:00 pm.
Asif and his brother warmly welcomed me. I wanted to do everything at once. Talk to my friend, eat, drink, get out of sweaty clothes, wash sweaty clothes, and wash sweaty body. Somehow it all got done. Now I have three full days off the bike (except for a jaunt sans bags, into Chicago).
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