Wednesday, 7/28
Wow, I slept well last night! I slept for about 10 hours, and when we woke around 7:00 this morning, I told Jodi I could sleep for 2 or 3 more hours. You can’t make much progress by sleeping, though, so we got up and went downstairs for the small continental breakfast the Alcazar serves, then we set out around 8:00.
We retraced the now familiar route down to the lake-front, then along the lake-front bikeway and the frontage road towards the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I’ve never been a fan of bike paths, and this one is no exception. Poor signage and minimal maintenance make for a poor ride. The bikeway also uses a frontage road squeezed between the highway and the airport, and traveled by trucks coming and going from a landfill or transfer station of some sort. We had to yell to each other to be heard above the traffic noise.
After riding around the Rock Hall, the science museum, and the Cleveland Browns Stadium, we merged back onto city streets and made our way over to the Detroit Superior Bridge. It was 9:00AM, the height of the morning rush hour, and I was amazed at how light the downtown traffic was. It was trivially easy to make our way through town and across the Cuyahoga River.
Once we left Cleveland we entered Lakewood, where we rode by block after block of beautiful homes. We stopped in Rocky River for a mid-morning snack about 20 miles into the day, then we rode through Bay Village, Avon Lake, Sheffield Lake, and into Lorain. It was noon when we reached Lorain with 40 miles on the odometer, where we stopped for lunch.
The wind was out of the southwest today, givings us a full-on headwind. As the day progressed the wind picked up, and by now we were working awfully hard to keep our forward progress going. It was also getting hot and very humid. We decided to push on just a bit further, to Vermilion, and look for a place to stay there. It was only about another 10 miles from Lorain to Vermilion, but it was a good job of work. We were riding on a four-lane, 55 MPH road with no or minimal shoulder, the wind was blowing hard, the humidity was high, and the thermometer on my bike computer registered 101 degrees out on the road in the sun.
When we got to Vermilion we stopped for a root beer float and asked the woman who waited on us if she knew of a place to get a room in town. She recommended the Holiday Inn Express about a mile out of town, at an exit off the highway. It was a good recommendation and that is where we are now. We’ve had a dip in the pool and a shower. Jodi is napping — “resting her eyes” she calls it — and I am watching The Andy Griffith Show on TV and writing this blog. It looks like the promised storms are building outside, so we’ll probably order something delivered for dinner tonight.
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