Yesterday presented with almost perfect weather here in Northern Illinois for a Saturday ride - a high temperature in the low 60° (F) range. While I do ride year round, for various reasons the winter months lend themselves to shorter distances, so it seemed only reasonable to celebrate this fine day with a longer ride.
I have probably three dozen routes laid out on the country roads around my home. While I truly admire people who can just go out and be spontaneous, I am, for better or worse, a person who feels spontaneity has its time and it’s place. I like to know where I’m going so I know what type of workout I’m going to get, and approximately how long I’ll be away for. So, unable to escape my own nature, I picked a 28.7-mile route that follows a long loop out and around and headed out.
I realized after I started out that the weather might have different designs. For as beautiful as the temperatures were, the clouds looked fairly heavy with moisture...
Gray skies
Still, it was warm enough that anything shy of a deluge would be pretty manageable, so I continued on and hoped that I’d avoid anything too rainy. I continued on along my pre-determined route right up to the point where I found... this:
But is it really closed?
I hit this point about six miles into my ride. And seeing it, of course, I did what any red-blooded American male would do:
I went down the road anyway.
I actually sort of figured that whatever was going on probably wasn’t happening on a Saturday afternoon. And I ride this way semi-regularly, so I know this is a fairly new thing, so they couldn't be too far into any road construction.
I was half right.
As I proceeded down the roadway I found that there had been some resurfacing done - this is a tar and chip road, as is the case for most of the paved byways out here.
Just a little resurfacing
And I took heart in this, because if that was all that had been done I should be able to make my way through it without any significant issue. But remember how no one would be doing road work on a Saturday? Apparently that doesn’t apply to this guy:
Working hard
What he appeared to be doing was cutting a trench in the middle of the road, and laying tile in it. I’ve never seen this before. Maybe it’s a common thing that the roads here have tile under them - my expertise with respect to roadways is almost entirely limited to using them - and it is the case that our prairie lands have extensive drainage systems to make them habitable for humans and amenable to agriculture. It in this case mostly what it meant was that he was kind of in the way of my forward progress. I mean geez - at least you could put up a sign or something to warn a guy that he’s not going to be able to make it down the road.
...oh yeah, right...
Since I’d never seen it before I watched for a bit from a safe distance, and sort of hoped that he might take a coffee or smoke break that would allow me to ride around him. It was neat to see, but it became clear that he was far more diligent than I was patient, so I turned around, forced to pursue a bit of variety in rounding out my ride.
Fortunately the roadways out here are laid out mostly on a grid pattern. It makes for riding maps that look a little like Tetris pieces, but it does mean that one can sort out how to approximate the distance one was seeking without too much additional effort. I returned to the road closed barrier and rode a mile to the south to take the next road westward.
Most of the rest of the ride was exactly what you expect out of a springtime cycling adventure in my little part of paradise - mostly quiet roadways where you are accompanied by the song of red-wing blackbirds and the smell of freshly turned earth and manure. Other people were out working on Saturday as well:
Working the fields
And that was all true until the last section of the ride, where a brief pause and a bit of mental math made it clear that I was going to fall a few miles shy of my target if I didn’t further modify the route. Mostly this just meant again going over a mile and back, and I thought I’d gotten pretty close. But as I approached the turn towards the last half mile up to the house, it was clear I was still a little under two miles shy. (It’s possible that the seat of a trike on the open road is not an ideal location for doing mathematics. Or that I’m dumb.).
So I rode past the turn for another three-quarters of a mile or so and turned around.
I always feel a little dumb doing that. I’m not sure why - the entire point of the ride is to get out and enjoy nature, get some exercise, and this contributes to it. I wasn’t technically going anywhere. But somehow that additional distance, when it’s just a stub off to the side like that, feels less... genuine to me than the rest of the ride. Like I’ve sold out in some way.
Maybe that’s why I feel like spontaneity has its time and it’s place. Or maybe I’m just a dork and need to get over it. After all, it was still a spring afternoon well spent.
