Ohio gozaimasu

Total distance: 524.8 km

By Yana: Kaze no Tanai Sundance mo Yana

Well, it turned out that the blustery day we had yesterday in Erie didn't stop us for long.  After our huge and protein-laden lunch in the nifty little art gallery/shop/cafe, we decided to hop on our bikes and basically go as far as we could.  By then it was 5pm, but hey, what does that bother us?  Upon climbing out of the windy valley where we had camped, we discovered that the winds were much more bearable.  We hit our groove fairly quickly, and quite comfortably rode through the impending darkness.  A few times, we were afraid that we had lost the trail, but that turned out to be unfounded.  There were a few dips in the road, basically a crazy steep downward slope, followed by its upward counterpart.  Those turned out to be great fun, once you get the hang of them.  You go careening down those hills at 45km p/h (we checked our maximum on our speedo afterwards), and your momentum carries you up most of the slope, and at some point you start pedalling like crazy to keep up the momentum.  It makes it remarkably easy to go up the hills.  Of course, me not being that much of an adrenalin junkie, I do still have a moment of breaking out in cold sweat for a moment, visualising myself going arse over tit and breaking several bones.  Still, much fun, and I suspect it might have been partially the adrenalin that kept us going as far as we did last night: almost 60km.  We got into Ohio when it was dark, ended up going right through Conneaut, and camped at a campsite in the next town.  The cool thing was that, as we arrived, we actually almost rode into a little cluster of deer, which ran off with their tails high when they saw us zooming up to them.

We got to sleep at about 2am, but that's not exactly unusual for us.  We still got up at a reasonable hour the next morning, though getting packed up was still a bit of a long process.  I guess we'll get better at it as time goes by.  We had decided to bite off quite a huge chunk to chew today: try and get to Cleveland, which would be our first day over 100km.  We've gone 80km so far, had a lovely dinner, and will probably run for it soon.  More to tell later.

By Sundance: Tall in the middle and round on both ends

I'm just going to brag quickly, because the laptop's battery is almost flat, but as you will have noticed from the total distance counter at the top of this entry, we busted through the 500 km mark today! That's given us a great sense of achievement. We're also really hitting our stride, dropping into cruising speed (about 22kph) really easily and immediately whenever we hit the road. Last week has been good training, and I think we'll be really cruising in a few more weeks, powering across the country.

I may have to amend an earlier comment, as I've discovered that it's not just Canadians - the locals here also wish is a "safe journey" all the time. Must be a North American thing.

I've also decided that the word 'Ohio' looks a bit like a bicycle.