When we awoke Sunday morning, we were pleasantly surprised to find the Olentangy Trail just steps away from the hotel. We didn’t take much time to explore it as we needed to get checked out and on our way, but we watched plenty of Columbus locals making their way along the trail on foot and on bicycle. We saw deer along the trail, the water flowing over a low dam, and a wetland research area with several birds. We pulled out our Merlin bird app and got to watch and listen to some of the birds there. There was also a massive cemetery there which are also interesting to me. Just names and dates. Not like Mom Capehart!
We headed West out of Columbus, and out of Ohio and into Indiana. We generally tried to stop in the welcome centers as we entered each new state. This didn’t always happen, but it did in Indiana. Unsurprisingly for a Sunday though, Indiana was closed.
By the time we got to Indianapolis (well, Carmel), it was time to charge again. We stopped in the parking lot of a Meijer grocery chain, and popped over to Naf Naf Grill which was a bit pricey for “fast casual” but also quite tasty. It was a windy day and we had to run down our napkins a couple of times as we ate outside to enjoy the June sunshine.
As was often the case, Rosie got done charging before we got done eating, so AC needed to jog over and fetch her and bring her back while we finished. On the road again, we made it into Illinois no problem. It was a roughly two hour jaunt to Champaign, IL where AC’s uncle Jim lives. We stopped in and visited him and his lovely tonkinese cat, “Daisy”.
Our route took us Northwest out of Champaign, and so it wasn’t much out of our way to head to Normal, IL. I was excited to take Rosie back to her birthplace! It was Sunday, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway, so we didn’t actually go in and try to see anyone. But we got to see the factory, the display models out front, and drive along “Rivian Motorway”, so that was all a treat.
We ended up having supper in nearby Bloomington, IL at Fiesta Ranchera while Rosie charged up at an Electrify America in a Walmart parking lot. While there, we looked up why Normal is called Normal: It was named for Illinois State Normal University where a “Normal School” is a teacher’s college (from the French: école normale.
We still had miles to go before we slept though. That evening, we made it (just) into Iowa to spend the night at the Residence Inn Davenport.
By this time, I was starting to regret bringing the bikes. Because we have a manual tonneau cover, the only way to get at the stuff in the truck bed is to lower the gate. But with the bikes on a hitch-mounted rack, it meant every time we wanted to get to our large luggage back, we had to get the bikes out of the way. Fortunately, the Quikrstuff Rack that we got has a hinge, so the bikes don’t need to be taken off of the rack. Still, it was heavy to lower all 3 bikes concurrently, and even lowered, the tailgate would come to rest on a pedal of the closest bike. We ended up padding the pedal with a towel each time to prevent damage to the tailgate. It worked well enough, but was still a bit of a hassle.