(Sept. 26, cont) I was riding south on the Upper Valley Pike road, but when I saw the little settlement of Lippincott off to the side, I decided this would be the place to turn east again. That meant climbing up out of the valley and going into the wind. But I was curious as to what the slope of the valley looked like. It was not a big hill — I had climbed plenty of bigger ones earlier in the day — but it had been a long day and I was starting to feel it.

Now that I’m snowbound as far as my bicycle goes, I’ve been studying Lippincott on the map, as well as the other places I’ve been. the above is based on a Google map as shown on my GPS Image Tracker program. The blue line is the trace recorded by my GPS. The yellow push-pins are places where I stopped to take photos. I was traveling from northwest to southeast. Note that I often don’t let a mile go by without stopping for a photo. *(The white line in the lower left is one mile long.)

The mad river shows up as a dark line on this map. The east edge of the valley is very obvious on the satellite photo, once one knows it’s there. I cheated here and traced it with a white line A yellow pushpin near the white line marks the site of Lippincott.

I was using county maps to find my way, as I usually do. One interesting effect of relying on county maps is that the earth’s surface gets divided up into disconnected sections, almost like different worlds, each of which ends at the county boundary. Cross a county boundary, and the first thing to change maps, first orienting myself on the new map. In a way this leaves the old world behind and starts a new one.

When I made the turn at McPherson’s place, I didn’t realize I was so close to the some of the places I had been back on September 2, which I’ve marked with a green line. But they were in a different world, across the line in Logan County.

On that September 2 I didn’t even have a Champaign County map with me, so the south boundary of Logan County did indeed seem like the end of the world. I had started the day in Bellefontaine, and had been doing some riding in the hilly country in the Virginia Military District. A piece of the boundary of that district, known as the Ludlow line, is shown in yellow. I came to the south edge of the county to visit some sites that I now recognize as being along the edge of the Mad River valley, and then rode over to West Liberty, mainly to get a bite to eat.

To get there I rode across some very flat country (shown above) but somehow wasn’t paying attention to the fact that this was the Mad River valley, even though I had been paying very close attention to that same valley northeast of West Liberty. General Hull’s army had marched north along that valley in 1812, and I had been trying to understand how it used the terrain. But somehow I didn’t connect the valley there with this flat valley bottom here, even though Hull’s army had come through this portion of the valley, too. All I was doing was trying to stay on the map, and get something to eat without going off the edge of the world, so to speak.

Now it was nearly a month later, and I was traveling down the Mad River valley without connecting it with the places I had been on September 2. Now in the comfort of my office I see I had been only a very few miles away, even though it then seemed somewhat like a different world.

I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well, but that’s one of the things I like about getting to know a place by bicycle. Gradually, sometimes over multiple trips, I learn how the parts of the terrain are connected, and learn it in a way that I don’t get without having been there, experiencing the terrain up close and personal.

Back to Lippincott. The hill was no big deal, even in my tired and hungry state, but I was running out of water. Several miles back I had wished I had stopped in DeGraff to get water. It had occurred to me as far back as the time when I was talking to Phil about the Cross in the Pasture that maybe I should ask for water. But I hadn’t done so, and now was trying to nurse what little I had left.

By now I was looking for homes that might have someone out in the yard who I could ask. At the place marked “Water!” a man was out doing yard work. I had found what I was looking for! He took me in the house and let me fill up my bottles, and I explained that my wife was going to meet me at Mutual. I asked if he knew about Dugan’s Prairie. We talked about various roads and who knows what else, and then I took off.

But I didn’t go much father before I realized I shouldn’t try to go to Mutual, after all. It would be too dark for photos, and I was starting to get chilled, too. I called Myra and we agreed to meet in Urbana, instead.