Joliet Road

Last weekend I salvaged three days of what was supposed to have been a week-long outing. The first day I rode to Bristol, IN (70 miles). We spent most of the second at the Elkhart County Historical Museum and a historic house, ending with a 30 mile ride. On the 3rd I rode 39 miles, ending at Door Village in LaPorte County.

The Joliet Road through Door Village and Door Prairie has long been one of my favorite places. It’s a part of Black Hawk’s old route, aka the Sauk Trail. It’s a part that goes through quiet prairie cropland.

Except it’s not so quiet any more. It’s still a good place to ride, but the road and crossroads are coming to be lined with homes. Those in the above photo are just a few of those that are new since my last ride through the place, which perhaps was as long ago as Fall 2004. This used to be a road on which I could contemplate how it must have been when Black Hawk and his entourage would come through. Now all the residential development makes it harder to turn my mind back to those times.

It’s somewhat distressing to see how some of my favorite places are changing, but probably not as destressing to me as it was to Black Hawk when he came through in the 1820s. Each year, especially on the eastern part of the Sauk Trail in the last half of that decade, there were more European-American settlers and more farms and cabins. It wasn’t the same anymore.

YTD mileage: 930.5