Day 31: Great (Mostly Gray) Riding Day

 

Toledo to Brunswick, 113 miles, 1800 feet of climbing.

Before today, we were indifferent to any feelings we had about Ohio, but she (he?) gave us great riding conditions, roads and trails, so we have pretty favorable views of the Buckeye State - at least for today.  We started off crossing the Maumee River via the Wayne Bridge, which gave us a nice view of the area, a mix of some pleasant looking neighborhoods mixed with industrial skyline. From there, we had a straight shot south and east until we caught up with Ohio’s North Coast Inland Trail which we followed on and off for 60 or so miles. (Why a “Inland Coast”? What coast is ever really inland?) The trail itself was a combination of dedicated trails (some paved, some dirt, some packed crushed stone) and routing along roads - all of it was fun. We had some of the most fun riding of the day on the most primitive parts of the trail.  Maybe it was the scenery (going right through fields of wheat and corn), maybe that we were able to negotiate rugged roads or maybe it was something else (perhaps we’re delusional) - but we had a lot of fun.

We had some good luck concerning weather today. Last night’s storm ebbed and flowed throughout the night, with one last hurrah just after dawn. The sky stayed gray and the winds remained strong - not the tailwind that we are still looking for, but not a headwind either, so we confer a “favorable” designation on it.  Bad, or at least unsettled, weather looked like it was just ahead throughout the day but we stayed dry throughout. (We found out that indeed it had poured in the early afternoon in Brunswick.). For us, it was some sun and a lot of gray clouds that kept us cool and added some dimension to what otherwise might have been dimensionless fields.

There are plenty of stretches of farm land here to be sure, but there are also more towns scattered throughout when compared to our experience further west in Montana and North Dakota. It is not surprising knowing what we do about the eastern side of the Mississippi, but we realized today that we haven’t dined curbside (adjacent to the service center of a nice gas station, like Cenex) in a while and hope that we don’t lose our frequent diner status anytime soon.

We’re off to points east tomorrow.  We’re just not sue where yet. We’ll figure it out soon enough.