Chicago to NYC – Day Two

Friday, September 27, 2019

Start: Fair Oaks, Indiana
End: Frankfort, Indiana
Mileage today/cumulative: 84 / 158
Elevation Ascended: 1,457′
Weather: Sunny, 57° at start; Sunny, 73º at finish; Wind – BRUTAL
Flat tires (entire group) day/cumulative: 0 / 1

On a trip like this, cyclists tend to be obsessed with weather forecasts. Every rider thinks that their weather app is the most accurate and you’ll find them at breakfast talking about the temperatures at the start and end points of the ride, the chances of rain all along the route, along with wind speed and direction. This always seems silly to me because we have no choice but to get on our bikes and ride to the next hotel. We can’t just say “oh, the weather’s going to be lousy today so let’s just take the day off.” If that were the case, we would have taken the day off, stayed another another night at Fair Oaks Farms (Indiana) and done the weird “dairy farm adventure“.

One look out the window at breakfast was all that was needed to realize that we were going to get the snot beat out of us. The wind was blowing trees sideways and coming straight from the south, which was exactly where we had to ride all day long.  The only thing to do was get on our bikes, put our heads down, and not think about how long it was going to take to ride 84 miles straight into a 20+ mph headwind. This was our longest mileage day on the trip and to make things more challenging, we lost an hour crossing over into the Eastern Time Zone. 

We spent the first 60 miles riding past cornfields, stopping just a few times to give ourselves a momentary break from the wind. The group splintered early, so Bev and I worked together, rotating to the front every five minutes to provide each other a brief respite.

This video pretty much summed it up.

We eventually rode straight through the Purdue University campus with thousands of students walking around. In the unlikely event that any of them noticed us, they probably wondered why somebody’s grandparents were riding through campus. We were wondering why college students looked like they were ten years old.

Once we left Purdue University and Lafayette, Indiana, it was 24 more long, hard miles on busy roads to our final destination of Frankfort, Indiana. There was, however, a huge reward for us at the end of this long day. Our ride leader, Bob Long, grew up in Frankfort and has maintained friendships with the family he lived next door to as a child. When the Ransom “kids” (all in or nearing their 70s), Tom, Jack, and Sally, learned that we would be spending a night in Frankfort, Jack and his wife Susie insisted on opening their home to us for a delicious home-cooked meal. Tom, Jack, and Sally each drove a car to pick up the entire group at our hotel and were genuinely thrilled to feed a bunch of starving cyclists. Bob had not seen all of his childhood neighbors together for many years and we considered ourselves fortunate to witness this reunion.

All three of the Ransoms have spent their entire lives in Frankfort (Bob moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Indiana University) and Tom and Jack recently retired after selling the local lumber and hardware store that had been owned and operated by their family for 146 years. Getting a huge dose of Midwest kindness and being embraced by these gracious people was just what the doctor ordered after a very long and hard day. The homemade lasagna, home-baked chocolate chip cookies and local ice cream didn’t hurt either.