Monday, September 8, 2008

Day 45 Palos Heights to Chesterton

Distance Biked Today:  55.4 miles

Time Spent Biking:  3:44

Avg Speed:  14.7 mph

Max speed: 26.6 mph

Total Distance Biked: 2905 miles

After ending the day fighting horrendous traffic, I was nervous about biking today. But I am excited and encourage after having great food, great conversations at the film festival, clean laundry last night. Today, I am happy that we are leaving later as there is a send-off service at 8 (I slept in till about 7!), I am carrying the gps-tracking device today, we are going to be at a wonderful state park tonight overlooking beautiful Lake Michigan, it a shorter distance today, and we have a lunch stop.

I am biking with the Mark and Larry Stehouwer today. And they were helping someone with a bent wheel so we didn't end up leaving till about 9:30, whereas we're used to leaving at 7-7:30. Yikes! We needed to get going!

And I forgot to mention; we had french toast for breakfast! Here the wonderful kitchen volunteers that have traveled with us are cleaning up after breakfast. Even though they work hard they have a lot of fun during the day.

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Trinity Christian College had a send-off service for us. Aaron Carpenter, a student here had words of thanks to Trinity and encouragement to us cyclists that 'this is only the beginning' of a chapter in our lives focusing on poverty which will continue long past when we reach Liberty State Park and stop cycling.

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Bethel Christian Reformed Church had refreshments along the way right before we crossed into Indiana. I later found out that the gps that I was carrying ,so anyone could track the tour and see where we were, stopped working here. I didn't break it; I promise!

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Second Christian Reformed Church had lunch for us. Just look at Brian Garrett's plate below. We had it all and plenty of it. And the welcome! Wow, were those some exciting kids. How could the not make you smile? Just watch the video below.

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Yes, I know I parked in a handicap spot...

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The "Welcome to Indiana" sign below has every single persons name written on it! Very impressive.

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Ten miles towards the end of the route toady were on a bike path. I still had a lot on energy, so I sprinted a lot especially as there were no cars to worry about. Man I am getting fast!

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I am very excited to see Lake Michigan and spend a night at a campground instead of a boring school. I everything about water plus I spend a lot of time each summer at Lake Michigan so riding to the lake will be a great end to the day.

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A church baked dozens of dozens of sweet items for us and were using four picnic tables to hold it all. What a treat once we got to the park. Except I ate too much. So much good food! I wanted to try everyone, but didn't even come close.

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At the park I went swimming with Mark and Josh. We had to hike over some big dunes to get to the lake but it was worth it. I was hoping to make it up to the top of one as the sun set, but I missed it because of our nightly peleton meeting. So I went up when it was dark and took this photo. The shutter was open for six seconds on this picture! If you look closely you can see downtown Chicago on the right.

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