Four Corners - Day 8

Start Location: Naperville, IL
Ending Location: Rocky River, OH
Miles Today: 366
Trip Miles: 2555
States Visited: 10
Low Temp: 75 degrees
High Temp: 87 degrees
Min Elevation: 582'
Max Elevation: 1063'

Route Map:

Well we had a great visit with the folks but it was time to hit the road again this morning. Although the morning was beautiful, 75 degrees and sunny, within 5 miles it was 80 degrees and we were stopped in morning traffic on I88 when we should have been going 65 MPH. It looks like our expectations for a bad day were going to be realized. Fortunately, by mile 10, the traffic was moving well and we would not experience any more stop and go traffic. That doesn't mean we would not have any more construction, after all this is the midwest and it's summer. We ran into the same construction on I294 that we saw earlier this summer, including long rows of cement trucks. We moved along just fine but the people going in the other direction were not quite so fortunate.

After 6 days of mostly secondary roads, riding on freeways and tollways was not too bad. At 70 miles an hour you cover a lot of ground very fast. It's not that you don't see a lot of interesting things on the freeways - you just see lots of different things. For example you certainly don't see truck loads of mobile home axles on the roads in Montana. The other thing is that Indiana and Ohio, at least the northern part, are both very flat. We could have taken dozens of pictures and they would all look like this. There's really not much difference between the freeways and the secondary roads.

Linda's getting pretty good at taking pictures at 60 miles per hour and we are both surprised at how well many of them turn out at that speed. This is a picture looking backwards at a Cedar Point sign. We thought that would be a significant landmark. Well maybe we still need a little more practice.

Even with losing an hour, we arrived in Rocky River by 5:00 which is probably the earliest we have stopped yet. We went over and had dinner with my mother and new stepfather and enjoyed a very pleasant evening with them. Tomorrow we will go over to see their new house and then hopefully I will install the new highway pegs on the motorcycle that I had shipped here and are due to arrive tomorrow - but that's a whole other story for a different day.

We're planning to stay here Thursday and Friday and then leave Saturday morning for Watertown, NY on our way to Madawaska, Maine. Then the countdown begins.

Back