Day 15

I know where they've hid the children. VBS -- Vacation Bible School.

Whether you believe the words 'Vacation' and 'School' should be part of the same compound or not, I have discovered why things seem oddly Pied Pipery.

I'm not going to linger on religion, so here's one last bit of strict reportage taken from the whiteboard in the classroom I slept in:

VBS -- Vacation Bible School July 12th-18
[3 feet over]
Characteristics You Want
Kindness
Trustworthy
Loving
Confident
Faithful
Honest
Giving person

Moving on, no wait, one more thing: You should see the size of their coffee machine. They buy coffee in crates, boil one thousand cups in a minute, and everyone must have a cup in hand.

Now, moving on. Lunch left me a little full and swollen. I ended up ordering a stack of 3 pancakes, screwing the florspar museum, drinking 6-or-so cups of sweat tea and getting into jittery conversations with the unfortunate people in my radius.

The fact that people talk to me is a testament to Mid-Western niceness. Here's a description of my appearance at the halfway mark. My face has Frenched up around the middle and I have the kind of suntan that looks more dirt than bronze. I am hopelessly unshaven. My hair is lightly-salted, blown dry, and made by the same person who does Pacino's wigs. My body ate my chest for lunch one day, but to compensate for this I've developed very wide shoulders and a tight face. My little upper body sits on ox legs that don't really work. Topping things off, I smell like Chinatown after an August trash collector's strike.

And still they say hello.

I rolled myself to the ferry and even managed to take a nap while I waited. I crossed the mighty Ohio and have ended up in Illinois.

Illinois, that pointy state of ad men with broad shoulders who come in on little cat feet. "Imagineer ad men, a new way to sell travelers on a barely complete gravel road and they will come." I took that 'scenic byway' from Cave In Rock to Elizabethtown and nearly collapsed from shaking. I went to the nearest liquor store and bought myself a gallon jug of water.

Elizabethtown is not the charming backroad Orlando Bloom charmed in the charmless, eponymous film. I saw a man in that store who extinguished a lit cigarette in his eyelid. I went out, sat on the curb, pounded my gallon jug, felt my stomach give way, and then laid prostrate on the dirty cement for a good hour's nap. I blended right in.

I called around to the nearest B&B to see if I could sleep off my waterover. I decided otherwise.

I would regret this decision with every inch of my shaking body when, after climbing 750 feet to my first plateau I got caught in the mother of all storms. I tried to out race it, but it caught up to me fast. I ran into the woods, found the lowest point, and then sat in the lightning position -- like you're sitting on a Chinese toilet with a tremendous headache. I tried to sit it out, but my small gully became a large river.

In a very Rambo move, I sprinted across the road, down a hill, and straight to someone's front door. I was scared. I kept my helmet on in the hopes of looking like less of a serial killer. Cue man and wife staring at wet man, lightening flashing, in bike gear. After the initial fear, we chatted, yada yada, I biked another 9 miles to a horse riding campground in Edenville, got dry, dried clothes, crap, I've got to go the storm has started again. I am safe, spent a long time getting my gear dry, and it might be getting wet all over again.