Reporting in from the middle of nowhere 10 feet from the highway

Location: 30 miles inside Illinois

Distance traveled today: 70 miles

Total Distance traveled: 1376

Today we didn’t start as early as we wanted. We ended up lounging around the house and then when we finally left we realized we were hungry. So we stopped at Panera Bread and ate some food. I got to talking with this guy named Matt who started to ask about the biking. I told him that one of the things about biking was that we always got a little bored. So he told us he would give us all these audio books that were on his external hard drive. One thing I figured I could do on this trip is learn Chinese since China is going to dominate in the future. Matt pulled through for me because he has learning Chinese on audiotape. He also gave us learning Spanish and Japanese. Thank you Matt!

We finally started to ride and were hit by tremendous winds. It was a lot worse than yesterday, but again we made it. We crossed into Illinois today and what was great was that the roads were completely empty. We would go almost 30 minutes without seeing a single car When we got into Illinois we finally changed time zones. We’re now on central time.. It started to get dark and we finally got to do some night riding with our lights. It was so intense riding with our lights. They looked like strobe lights bouncing around. I was blasting techno music (Tiesto’s In search of Sunrise 7) from my Ipod so it was a good mix with the lights. We got to our town around 11 pm and stopped by the police station and asked where we could camp out. He told us there was a spot about 2 miles out of town that was an old park that they had closed down. So off we went and we found it about 15 minutes later. We set up our tent and I’m writing to you lying here in it about 10 feet from the road.

How am I able to be on the internet right now? Well I have my blackberry and I have my laptop. Verizon offers this service called tethering where I connect the blackberry’s internet to the laptop and bam I can be online anywhere even right next to the highway in the middle of nowhere.

our tent next to the road

Tomorrow is a rest day!!