With Lake Erie behind me, I have now entered a giant multi-state corn field. As I travel west the fields just keep getting bigger and bigger, until you look at the map and notice that the roads are pretty evenly spaced out in 1 mile squares and most of those squares are just giant corn fields. On the flip side, the roads have no traffic and all the small town people are some of the friendliest people I've ever met.
I stopped for lunch at a cafe in Paulding, OH, and chatted with one of the people working there about cycling across the country. A few minutes later, a gentleman named Gary Unger came over and shook my hand and gave me his card. He works for a couple radio stations, WPAU in Pauling, OH; KRTE in Williams, AZ; and WPNM in Ottawa, OH. He had overhead what I was doing and wanted me to call in with updates about my trip and he would put them on the air... and as he left he paid for my lunch! I feel bad I haven't been able to call him yet as my phone's speaker & mic have stopped working for the most part, thought sometimes if you smack the back repeatedly it will work momentarily (oh yeah, that started to happen too, I need that new phone!)
After lunch as I continued my western route I left Ohio and crossed into Indiana! State #4! My route took me south of Fort Wayne and through Hoagland, IA, where I met a mid-20's guy who told me how a couple years ago he and a friend decided to bike from there to Maine along the Northern Tier route (he recognized my map.) He hadn't really ridden a bike in years before he went, and regaled me of the horrors of just jumping on a bike and riding long distances, but sadly he only got to Niagra Falls before calling it and having to get a ride home.
As I was rounding out the day I stopped at a small store in Zanesville, IA for some food. The lady working there asked if I was cycling across the country and told me that the assistant principal for the local school, Rob, lived nearby and welcomed cyclists to camp next to his pond in his far back yard. So I made my way over there and he was not home. But his kids were, and showed me where I could set up for the night. Talking to them I found out that Rob and one of his kids were going to spend a couple weeks in Africa doing missionary work, 14 hours into the bush. Wow. If anything goes horribly wrong on my ride, at least I'm still in America and could always hop a greyhound and be back home in a couple days. Being out in the middle of nowhere Africa is a whole other level of remoteness. They let me grab a shower and as I finished up Rob and his wife came home and greeted me.
I asked them why I saw so many houses with gravel-lined ponds, I was curious if they were the midwest equivalent of a swimming pool, and he told me that years back the corps of engineers thought they would help control flooding so they covered 80% of the cost, so everyone got very cheap ponds! Then I went back to the pond and conked out for the night.
Start: Defiance, OH
End: Zanesville, IN
Distance: 77.65 miles
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