Today was bike maintaince day.......
We stopped in Carbondale IL. Its a well known town for TransAmerican riders, sort of the Damascaus of the AT. There are 3 bike shops on the same street, directly on the route. They were extremely friendly and really did gear their shops for transamericans. We got much needed supplies that we have not been able to find 'till now: reflective triangles, mirror ( a special kind for George's bike), and route map holder. The bike has performed great up to this point, everything functioning great (with the exception of the mirror but hopefully new mirror will change that). We went to the "bike surgeon". They spent about 2 hours on the bike, cleaning the drive train, lubricating the cables, rotation the tires and replacing and putting on a new chain. The cost $45. George had similar maintenance before leaving for the trip and our Local bike store charged us close to $200 and they didn't clean the drive train or rotate the tires. Pretty cool, ain't? (George helped me writing these lines... obviously...). George did have a hard time getting to his destination today, mainly because of some major damage done by an internal hurricane (winds of up to 106 mph) that hit this area about a 1.5 weeks ago. This caused some missing road signs and construction that was not shown on his bike map. My leisurely (slow) run turned into a fast Tempo run as I had forgotten to take the GPS with me on my run (of course, today was the day for that) and had to run back fast to the car to help George with directions. The good thing is that George is not the only one with soar legs today, for a change I feel my legs too... yeah.. Oh not to mention (my favorite part) we had really good Thai food for lunch while bike was being worked on. We have not had any ethnic food since the bike tour started.
We went from Tunnel Hill, IL to Murphysboro, IL
Total miles: 50
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