The town of Iroquois was the end of the day’s ride of 72 miles. It was a long ride, but it has taken more time to blog about it than it did to ride it.

There was a little park alongside the highway. After taking a few photos we put the bicycle on the top of the car. A young man came over and asked if we were thru-bikers. We weren’t of course. I haven’t done much of that kind of riding lately. But he told us that a lot of thru-bikers stay overnight and that Iroquois is marked on the cross-country bicycling maps as a place for bicyclers to stay. He pointed to the far end of the park and said something about showers and restrooms. That is good to know and I’ll definitely keep it in mind.

I just now looked it up at crazyguyonabike.com. Apparently the Adventure Cycling Association maps say to call the mayor when you get to Iroquois, and he will unlock the restrooms for you. Moni, who I know from the phred bicycle touring list tells about it with photos here. And a Paul Moore does the same here:

No, this isn’t the place for bicycling tourists. It’s an old jail that has been moved to the park. I think the place for bicycle tourists is somewhere on the other side of it.

In 1832 19 members of Captain Joseph Orr’s militia company of mounted rangers were “detached to post at Iroquois.” Whether they camped on this very same spot, I don’t know. I would guess they camped a little closer to the river, for easy access to water. But this park would have been a good spot if it had existed then.

More Aug 3. When I got to the Illinois border, the windmills came to an end. In the photo above, Illinois is on the left side of the road, and Indiana on the right.

One of the things I looked forward to in Illinois was using the excellent bicycle maps put out by the Department of Transportation. I have paper fold-up maps from four years ago, but those are no longer distributed. In some ways it’s not quite as nice, but you can now download them here as PDFs, county-by-county. The above is a snippet of the online map of Iroquois County. I’ve outlined my route in yellow.

The best bicycle routes are the green ones. The red ones are good ones to avoid, though I have found that it depends. There are some red ones I would not care to ride on, ever, and some that are usable at the right time of day and week.

I was curious about route 1300N, which is a brighter red on my paper map than on the online one. What is a country road like that, in what is a very sparcely populated and sparcely traveled area, doing in that color?

I took a photo as I rode past on 3000E, on my way north. It’s a concrete road with some cracks and grass growing in it. Is that really so dangerous to ride on? It reminded me of a type of road I had seen when we moved to central Illinois in 1970. There were some one-lane concrete roads out in the country where, if you met an oncoming car, you’d have to move over and put your right wheels in the gravel. It would be best not to meet an oncoming car at the top of a hill in one of those. This road is like those, though it seems somewhat wider than those I remember.

Maybe the bike route raters thought it was too dangerous on general principles. You wouldn’t want a bike meeting a car on a hill. Never mind that there are no hills in this part of Illinois. If I had known it was like this, I might have not ridden out of my way to avoid the road. (The windmills in the distance are across the border — in Indiana.)