Day 38 – "I like big butts and I cannot lie!"

I should really count how many times I write the word “fun” in this blog, along with “beautiful” and “inspiring” and “sweet.” Well, today was a really “fun” day. We really took our time today, and had a grand time on the back roads of Ohio. I know that some people were considering cutting some miles by taking the highway today, but I wouldn’t even consider trading twenty miles for the quiet and rarely trafficked country roads. We found a nice little local coffee shop in one of the towns, with good coffee and espresso. It was also a used bookstore, and Ane found an awesome book called Arctic Dreams for me, one that I had read partially in the Arctic on my canoe trip. Of course it was fate and I had to buy it. After that we retreated to the bathrooms in the back to apply more tattoos, or “iron-ons” as Helen likes to call them. Ane and I were styling in them, but unfortunately for Ben and Sean they didn’t realize that you need to peel off the plastic before you wet the back to apply them. Poor guys, they’re going to get a hard time for this one for a while.

We enjoyed the scenery, some windmills, and winding country roads through corn fields. Mark’s waterstop today was in a little town across the street from a Speedway station, which had slurpee-type drinks! You wouldn’t know it from this trip, because I’m usually some kind of health nut, but man that slurpee tasted good. My tire blew up while I was in the gas station, and I was only sorry that I didn’t hear it because it sounded like a firecracker I was told. After the tire change, we were off again.

During the afternoon I was taken back through memory lane as we sang all of the songs from the nineties that I listened to as an ultra-cool middle schooler. It was hot and sweaty, but we had a blast singing. We finally got into Sandusky, upon which I still had about ten more miles to complete owing to a moment of absurdity last night when I pinky-swore to ride out a full century today. So we set out again from camp with David Latner, a self-professed sucker for extra miles, and explored the city of Sandusky. We weren’t allowed to ride our bikes across the bridge to Cedar Point, but we cut through the parking lot for the workers’ dormitories to make it to the shoreline for pictures. Those rides are so big that you can see them on a clear day across the bay forty miles away. Crazy.

The extra ten miles was through an ugly tourist area, but we found ourself at a little deli that served me a huge garden salad with fresh spring mix lettuce, which was quite a treat. I felt really bad that I accidentally missed lunch duty, but with a little (no, a lot!) of help from Ben and Sean I made it up by taking care of tomorrow’s water jugs. We’re all crammed in tonight to a little area of the campground, but it’ll be cozy and even we plan on getting up early tomorrow because people want to make it to a baseball game in Cleveland tomorrow.