32 Mile Bike Ride @ 98 Degrees!

Well - OK, it wasn't 98 degrees when I started the ride, but it was by the time I finished.

But let me back up a bit here.

I've been making the trip between Texas and the clan-home for 44 years now, and in that time I've marked up my map with a few spots for hiking, camping, and biking (And the general location of a fellow blogger's domicile!).

When heading back to Texas I often linger along the way (Maybe because the Wife doesn't always seem that enthused about me coming home?!), taking advantage of one or two of these spots or seeing if I can find new ones.

This year was no different.

Initially I had my eye on the Blackwell Horse Camp (you don't actually need a horse to stay there) between Bloomington and Bedford Indiana in the middle of the Charles C Deam Wilderness section of the Hoosier National Forest. Free, easy access, and a few nearby trailheads.

But other than the narrow corridor of the FS road, no engines, powered tools, or wheeled conveyances of any kind are allowed (even trail maintenance must be done on foot and by hand in all nationally designated wilderness areas) and the Lectric 3.0 on the rack was burning a hole in my pocket,

so, with apologies to a fellow blogger that I bypassed without so much as a long-distance wave, instead I headed further southwest of there to the Tunnel Hill State Trail, a rails-to-trails project in Illinois.

There are a number of places to jump on this 45 mile long trail. I chose the Viena city park about an hour south of where I spent the night before, because it has a large parking area with plenty of room for my diminutive, but larger than just a car, setup.

Where I'm standing used to be part of the tunnel too, but after a cave-in in the 1920's about 300 feet of the tunnel was opened to the sky (it's technically called daylighting, not an uncommon occurrence with old railroad tunnels) and a new portal constructed.

From there it's about 9 miles of peddling, generally uphill, to the trail's namesake tunnel. 

Just on the other side of the tunnel is the remnants of  the 'town' of Tunnel Hill created by the people that were digging the tunnel in the first place. There's also a parking area, water, pit-toilet, and picnic tables for those using the trail.

In the past this has generally been my turnaround spot since continuing on is to head downhill, which, for those of us without access to shuttle-rides, means an uphill slog to get back to this point before we can start the final 9 miles back to where the vehicle waits, but bolstered by the confidence of battery power this trip I continued on

towards the next access, and amenities, point at New Burnside

But before getting that far there's the offset remnants of a bridge over the trail where, back in the day, two railroads crossed each other at an oblique angle.

These were the days of rail-travel and here the town of Parker, with hotels, restaurants, and barbershops thrived on servicing those travelers.

But once the passenger cars quit running Parker completely disapeared back into the woods and is now known on maps as he Parker Site

By the way, the beaver dams that used to be between Tunnel Hill and the Parker Site are gone now,

but the scenery alongside the trail is still there.

 Next stop, Burnside, and

another trail-access point with amenities.

At this point I was pleased with how the ebike was working out on a long-ish ride and was tempted to  continue on another 4.5 miles to the next access point at Stonefort. But I didn't want to do something stupid (OK - even more stupid than being out here in this heat in the first place!), so forced myself to make this my turnaround spot.

But first, time for a bit of lunch to keep a growing boy going!

With that done, and nothing much else to do (you know - since I was being sensible - ohhh maaann, what a drag!) I headed on back to Viena.

By this point, around mid day, things were seriously heating up and I hadn't seen anyone else out on the trail in quite some time.

I guess I was the only idiot in the county that day. But I'm an idiot that lives in Texas and spends most every day year round outside and has learned how not to die in the heat - at least so far.

So, while the heat wasn't all that great, the ride was. First longish ride on the new ebike and I wasn’t disappointed.

I'll go into more detail on how the bike is working out in a future post.

But now that I didn't have the breeze of motion tempering the heat, it was HOT!

By the time I had the bike loaded back up on the rack it was still only mid-afternoon. I didn't  want to get too much further south before stopping for the night, and in this heat (it was 98 inside the trailer at that time and 104 when I crossed Arkansas the next day) I really didn't want to stop until sundown, which was a long ways away.

I knew of a State Forest Recreation site, Lake Glendale, about 15 miles east of where I was so my plan was to head on over there and kill the rest of the afternoon hanging around in shade of the day-use area.

I've stayed in the campground over there in the past, but it's a FCFS campground not that far from several medium-sized cities and this was a Friday, but just for grins, when I got there I thought I'd drive through the non-electric loops to see what was up before heading to one of the day-use areas to chill (metaphorically, not actually).

This recreation area is run by a vendor that gets a healthy percentage of the revenue. I was here close to Labor Day one year and not only were the designated campsites full, the vendor, with thier eye on profits, had campers scattered all over the place. In the day-use areas, the group site, out in the field next to the swimming beach, around the edges of parking areas, even in little clearings just barely off the roads. So I didn't expect much in the way of empty campsites on this summer Friday.

Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. In fact out of the 30 or more non-electric campsites not a single one was taken. 

So change of plans. Damn-fool idea or not, $10 with my geezer card got me a decent, though sweltering, campsite with nearby flush toilets and hot-ish showers tucked into the quiet of the trees.

Come morning, a Saturday, I was still the solitary idiot camping out there, but it wasn't getting any cooler so it was time to head on home where I could at least sleep in air-conditioned space..

That night's stop would be another rest area not too far into Texas, but I certainly didn't want to get there until the sun had been down for an hour or so, so I slow-played the drive. Taking the 'scenic' route down to the southern end of Illinois on State road 37 (I quoted scenic because by the time you get down close to Cairo there's not much scenic about it), then working my way across Arkansas on its smaller roads.

Yes, by pushing it I could have made it all the way home in one shot, but the Wife really doesn't like late-night visitors, even me. (Especially me?)

Coming And Going

 

Family reunions. What a bag of worms they are!

There's that whole emotional side. Surviving the, sometimes toxic, concoction of chunky soup that rattle-can stirs up!

There's going to be some people there I really want to see, some I wouldn't mind seeing, and some I could do without seeing. But regardless, I'm going to be expected to engage in the social niceties while floating around in that cauldron, unable to get away from all the other chunks of cooked, raw, savory, mushy, palatable, noxious bits trapped in the same greasy stew by the random chance of blood and marriage.

And then there's the practicalities of logistics.

According to Google maps I'm 1340 miles, or 20.5 hours away from the clan-home. I find that, on a good day, I have to add an hour for every 6 Google hours, so in the real world it's more like 24 hours away.

In the past I could do that. Drive all day then let the coming night gradually wrap me in a comfortable cocoon of anonimity, solitude, and headlights as I slip unnoticed past the real world still going on behind the dim yellow squares of curtained windows until dawn gradually exposes me again, but not anymore.

I recently managed 16 hours in a single shot, from the property to Salida CO when on my way to pick up the teardrop, but that was pushing it a bit. 

The red arrows point to a half dozen RV spaces along the edge of the truck parking area which keep you out of the way of the precious (there's never enough) truck parking. I've never seen more than 2, counting me, RVs overnighting here at a time.

My current favorite first-night stopping point between here and the clan-home is just over 12 hours away, and that's not too bad. During the summer, if I leave the house at a decent, but not ungodly, hour, it's just coming up on sunset when I stop, and as an added bonus I'm almost completely through that barren wasteland of the Mississippi River flood plain. 

I can do the trip in 2 if I have to, but now days it usually takes me 2 and a bit calender days to drive straight through to the clan-home. Leave on Saturday morning, take it easy working my way further north on Sunday, and pull into a sibling's driveway around 1000 on Monday.

This year it was the Brother's driveway I landed in. 

The Brother was 15 when I left home. He was off in the world of cars, speed (as in go fast, not the chemical kind), and all other things mechanical, I was off in - well, I'm not sure what the hell world I was off in - but I do know that our two worlds rarely intersected in those days, even before I left home.

Ideologically, philosophically, politically, the Brother and I are very different people. But around our house we didn't call the carpenter when it was time to build the new garage, the tile-layer to finish the downstairs bathroom, or the mason to construct the freestanding-fireplace suround in the rec-room. Instead we grew up with a steady stream of projects, during which Dad taught us how to line our shoulder up over the blade of the hand-saw in order to cut straight and square, and how to hold a hammer to drive a roofing nail with a tap and two blows. He taught us how to work together smoothly, efficiently, intelligently.

To this day, on those rare occasions when the Brother and I are in the shop together, we work side by side without getting in each other's way, ideas and concepts are quickly grasped and understood, tools and supporting hands are where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be. We work together smoothly, efficiently, intelligently.

So that’s our thing. We plan a project or two together and call it a visit. Except that this year there was that whole - stop and restart his heart; three times; in an attempt to get all the heart-bits working together properly, and when that didn't work, install a pacemaker/defibulator along with threading in two seperate sets of wires attached to his heart - thing that the Brother was subjected to just over a week before I arrived.

When I pulled into the driveway he could barely manage a couple hours on his feet before taking to his bed again, and lift something? No way! So it didn't look good for projects and shop-time!

But like the quintessential macho fool, he was determined to carry on anyway. That evening the Brother, his wife, and I loaded folding chairs into a car and drove a few miles to thier town's downtown,

where every Monday evening the street is closed down for an informal car show. Those with, park their classic, muscle, custom, or just plain sweet ride, cars along the street, those without walk the street admiring, and the rest of us park our folding chairs against a building and watch.

Yeah, I know, hardly my thing, but now with my only traditional friend recently dead I'm more aware of the need to try and embrace the occasional social interaction, so I went.

The Grondins College of Cosmetology was right actoss the street from us. The heads in the second floor windows were slightly creepy!

Actually it wasn't too bad. Almost enjoyable even. Pretending that I'm just like the next person for a couple of hours. Not that I actually did anything other than sit in my chair against the wall like a - well, wallflower.

The next day was exciting though!

It didn't start out that way. Knowing he was going to just be out of surgery I had brought a couple of security allen wrenches from the bike rack with me that I wanted a hole punched through so I could hang them off a split-ring. Being hardened tool-steel I had nothing in my shop that would do any more than leave a little scratch on the surface, but the Brother would have just what was needed. A small, simple project, but a project nonetheless.

Well, even slow-playing it, that took all of 40 minutes start to finish.

That's when the excitement started!

I had previously mentioned to the Brother that it would be nice to weld a nut on the stub-end of the teardrop's jack handle

so I could use my electric drill like I can on the jack of the cargo trailer rather than having to hand-crank the thing. Well, the Brother remembered that and was hell-bent on doing some welding!

But here's the thing. When you have a pacemaker/defibulator you are not supposed to stand right in front of a running microwave, or next to a 480v 3 phase brush/commutator motor, and welding is off the table lest the EMF from the arc sets off the defibulator.

Well fabricating is the Brother's life so he had several discussions with the cardiologist about that whole welding thing, including trying to get his hands on one of those gizmos so that he could turn off the defibulator while welding then turn it back on again when he was done. (Yeah, that didn't fly with the doctor!)

They came to a compromise where stick welding was out because that produces really dirty EMF, but he could TIG and MIG weld as long as he kept the arc at least 12" from the pace/defib and the current less than 100 amps. (The doctor placed the pace/defib on his side under the right-handed Brother's left arm rather than the usual upper-left chest to make it easier to keep it 12" from the arc)

But the doctor also told him he couldn't resume normal activities for 14 days while the unit settled in and learned his heart-signals. Well here we are, in the shop maybe 9 days after his surgery with the jack off the teardrop and he's suiting up over at his welding table! His excuse was that he didn't have a calendar and was bad with math.

He turned the welder on and I pointed out that at the 97 amps he had it set for, it was pretty close to his 100 amp maximum. - He reached over and turned it down to 95 amps - Like that was going to make a difference!

I backed off a good distance (everybody around him has been told if the defib goes off he's going to flop around like - well, like he's being shocked, and instructed to NOT touch him until EMS arrives with the gizmo to shut the damn thing off!), I had 911 dialed into my phone, and my thumb hovering over the send button!

Welding is a precise business and requires a steady hand. When that first arc flashed he didn't even flinch, but I jumped high enough to put daylight under my feet and had to choke back a squeal!

But nothing bad happened. No herky-jerky, no smoke eminating from places smoke isn't supposed to be eminating from, no dead brother, just another day at the welder. And now I have a 13mm nut (same size as the screw-in tent stakes I use) welded onto my jack. A cheap man's electric tongue-jack.

Wednesday I relocated from his driveway to the group campsite in a county park that we use for the reunion.

Sunday was a mix of relief and melancholy.

By mid afternoon what had been a vibrant mix of people and rigs and food and conversation and games and general mingling and unmingling the day before, was an empty patch of ground, made all that much emptier by remnants of other groups hanging on through the Tuesday checkout deadline as my little rig occupied the lone patch of 17 campsites that we, as a family, had temporarily owned and brought to life.

No faces as usual, but this is the Daughter's water-bottle with her dog-care business logo on it.

This reunion was even more special than usual because, for the first time in a good 20 years, the Daughter left both of her businesses in Tucson, one a dog-care and the other themed sleepovers (think girl scouts with tee-pees and a southwest theme and birthday get-togethers with inflatable tents and the latest super-hero theme), to make a quick weekend trip to join us this year. The most consecutive time I've spent with her since she was about 12.

And that made the aftermath just that much more desolate.

I was hanging around, putting miles on my bike as a distraction, to give my sisters (OK, technically sister and sister-in-law, but that's just too cumbersome, and unnessessary.), who live in a sort of urban subdivision, time to unload thier trailer and get it over to storage to make room for me in thier driveway.

Three years ago they had an electrical project for me, but I was in no shape to make the trip that year so they ended up paying an electrician to get it done. Last year was all about visiting with Mom. This year they had a small woodworking project they needed help with, so of course I was going to stick around for that.

Thier trailer is a 19'-er that grosses at 5000 pounds that they tow with a Honda Passport and the monsterous equalizer hitch used to make the connection between the two wieghs in at about 45 pounds. Nothing the two of them together can't personhandle around at the moment, but they are thinking of the future when that may be too much for them and envisioned a castored dolly for transporting the hitch between spot-in-the-garage and reciever-on-the-car. They had a leftover chunk of particle board and wanted help selecting and installing castors on it.

I'm not sure they appreciated my 'help' because in the end it cost more than a handfull of castors, but I went one step farther with the concept. OK, maybe 4 or 5 steps farther.

The castored base is still there, but now made with cabinet-grade plywood which won't sag over time under the weight in a damp garage, with blocks on top of the 4 corners to give the castor mounting screws more bite without raising the overall height. But now there's a scissor jack bolted to the platform which is operated by a socket chucked into a battery powered drill. (Same socket and drill they use for the leveling jacks on the trailer) Bolted on top of the jack is another platform that the hitch snuggles into where it's held in place by the same hitch-pin that secures it to the car.

Now they roll the hitch over to the car, use the drill to raise it up to the right height, slip it into the receiver and pin it in place. To remove it, just reverse the pinning procedure and lower the upper platform so it's resting on the stabilizer blocks, then roll dolly and hitch into a corner of the garage. No actual lifting required.

A little paint will make it look better as well as last longer, but it's still a little more crude than I would like. But we didn't have access to my fully equipped shop and were working with hand tools. (How can people survive without at least a tablesaw and a decent square?!)

But now it was time to give them their driveway, and lives back (their social calendar is the stuff of my nightmares! and they had things to do.), so with some anticipation tempered by the melancholy of saying goodby, 

I headed south to another favorite overnight spot.

No specific RV slots at this southbound I-57 rest area right on Rend Lake, but there's plenty of room to parrallel park a whole slew of RV's along that loop which is on a peninsula jutting out into the lake.

Wishful Thinking?

I could look like this too if I had a thick rope instead of a little bit of frayed twine!

The Teardrop In The Wild!

 Well - - - maybe not all that wild.

I just got back from the family reunion campout up in Michigan and with trailers  ranging from 19' up to 40' long (not counting my little teardrop), and some attendees (as usual, there were about 40 of us there) that require flush toilets and hot showers, you can't get too wild.

At the place we go, the group-loops are electric only with a couple of potable water hydrants in the communal center of the loops and a five minute walk to the bathhouse, and that's about all the wild some of us can handle.

But I "struggled" through anyway.

I got a lot of sympathetic looks (one person, as in all on thier lonesome nowadays, since it was his wife's memorial service I was at in March, was there in his 40' bumper-pull with two slideouts and chandeliers over the stone-topped kitchen island!),

a few, semi-tolerant eye-rolls (as in "he always was the weird one"),

and a couple of head-shakes, but I dare say I was just as comfortable as those with larger rigs and my 'shower room' was bigger (the bike is stored in there too, to the right just out of the shot.) and arguably cleaner, than what the bathouses had to offer.

I got a couple of incredulous 'do you really sleep in there!"s.

Well - yeah, and more - quite comfortably.

The low-slung beach-chair leaves me about a foot of head-clearance for decadent lounging, I've put wooden tops on both my Boxio's, one the toilet and the other a self-contained wash-sink, so they make great little tables as well as good seats for dealing with socks and shoes like a civilized person.

In this photo the bedroll - a sleeping bag and deflated 7" thick single-sized air-mattress, are rolled up out of the way to the left.

In this shot I'm using my other option. A 6" foam tri-fold mattress with the sleeping bag tucked in behind it.

Both boxio's stow under the cabinet to the left, and the chair folds up and stands out of the way against the front wall

 when either mattress is deployed for sleeping.

There's a little more floor space available when using the air-mattress option, but I have found I don't really use that extra space. The tri-fold is quicker to deploy when I'm worn out at the end of the day, but with a 12v airpump for the air-mattress, not by much. Both are equally comfortable to sleep on.

Here's where being a curmudgeon that camps by himself comes in handy! Usually the entire floor space of a teardrop this size is covered by mattress and the occupants are pretty much limited to kneeling long enough to change clothes and sleeping, but I've got plenty of room in there for - well, living. I've even brought my stove inside a couple of times to make evening tea in out of the weather.

The cargo trailer is roomier, maybe decadently so, but short of full-time living, which I could easily do in the cargo trailer, the teardrop is quite comfortable for me and tows easier. (Not that the cargo trailer is all that hard to tow either.)

In the county park we go to, you rent the group sites from Wednesday to the next Tuesday.

It might have been something I said, but come Sunday night this is what our loop looked like. (Those trailers in the distance are on a different loop.)

The drunken old fool from an ajacent loop took my solitude as an invitation to come on over. After a week of dealing with wall-to-wall relatives I shut that down in a hurry!

I had to stick around to give my sisters time to unload thier trailer and get it over to storage so I would have a spot in thier suburban driveway because they had a project they wanted my woodworking help with, but that's a theme for a different post.

Are They Amused?

We have 14 acres of heavily wooded property. That means thousands of trees.

I have, with a lot of work cut a bunch of trails through those woods. Other than the few open areas we have it's  pretty thick going and it took me quite a while of working on it a few snatched hours at a time.

But now there's trail maintenance.

That stuff out there just insists on constantly growing! Not that I'm terribly particular about "grooming" the trails to public-trail standards where they have to worry about some snowflake, that has no business being out on a trail in the first place, sueing because a stray twig made a mark on thier face, or a low branch messed up thier hair.

Yep, that’s a section of one of my trails

 Not exactly groomed to public-space standards

No, my trails are a little on the rugged side, requiring a lot of ducking, weaving, and high-stepping as I make my way along them (good for core strength and balance).

 I do wear a stiff straw hat which helps deflect pointy, scratchy things when ducking my head and bulling my way through. (And the wide brim sweeps some of the cobwebs away from my face too, a hazard of hiking just after dawn.)

This, the one up in the air, not the one laying on the ground, wasn't there yesterday. The trail is supposed to be right there in the middle of the photo. This thing is hanging across the trail just a little above crotch high and bent two smaller trees down with it.

But it seems like, with all that ground out there, a disproportionate number of trees fall right into my trails.

Maybe it amuses them.

Sometimes they very politely lay down neatly and I can just step over and leave them there to do what they do naturaly.

Sometimes I can just re-route the trail around them with a few minutes work with a heavy pair of loppers,

What I would have to cut through to re-route around this latest downed tree.

but other times, like this one, going around is a whole lota work and just not very practical.

When that happens I have to lug the heavy chainsaw back there, in this case over two ridges and through one valley,

and remove the obstruction from my original trail.

I swear that sometimes, when the saw is running and I have my hearing-protection on, I can almost hear a chuckle or two.

And, in case anybody caught that in the previous photo, yes. That's a battery powered chainsaw.

Back when I was clearing space for our barns and initially cutting trails I had a couple of gas-powered chainsaws, but unlike my brother I have a terrible time keeping small gas engines happy. And now that the barns are up, the trails cut, and I'm a little older, if theres any serious tree-falling to be done around here I'll call an insured and bonded arborist. So the troublesome gas saws moved on to new homes and I picked up a Greenworks 48V battery powered chainsaw for simple maintenance work.

Greenworks because that's the same brand, and the same 24V batteries, as the drill and impact-driver I carry in the Ranger.

So far I have never flattened the saw's batteries while doing my usual maintenance, which sometimes has included a significant number of cuts through 12" or larger logs. But if I ever do flatten the batteries, it was probably time to take a break anyway while the batteries charge back up.

Gas or battery, it's still a chainsaw. It still requires chain-oil and gets dirty and gummy when used.

Some reviewers of this particular saw complain about the chain-oil leaking when the saw is sitting on the shelf. Personally I suspect that they aren't cleaning the saw and all the collected gunk is wicking the oil out of the reservoir.

And yep, I'm that annoying guy that backs into parking spots and driveways so I'm pointed the right way when it's time to leave and puts the lawnmower away clean and full of gas so it's ready for next time.

I'm that anal fool that, everytime I use it, opens up the chainsaw and cleans it out, tops up the oil reservoir,

and hones up each and every tooth with a few swipes of the sharpening file

before putting it up for next time.

And I have never had an issue with leaking chain-oil.

Oh damn! Gota go.

One of the branches on that big live-oak keeps growing and has nearly blocked the trail over the pond's dam.

Later people!