Day 35 Crandon to Shawano

Day 35 (7 Sep 09) Crandon to Shawano 92 miles

We ate breakfast with the variably hung over bush racing fans from Texas - yes, they came all the way from Texas. How’d we learn the name of the “sport,” you ask? Later in the day in Pella we stopped into Hurricane Dawn’s café (couldn’t get the story on why Dawn got the nickname Hurricane) for water and in the course of discussion with the young woman tending bar (Dawn was in the kitchen), we learned the term “bush racing” and that it was the biggest deal in this area all summer. From the Texans, we heard about the Jurassic Park Bar, a place where you can see a 400 pound guy go down a mud slide with three women on his back and land in a pool full of mud. Guess if you’ve had enough to drink, something like that could be a lot of fun to watch.

At mid-morning we made a wrong turn (the map instructions were a little vague) and after going a half mile decided that we were going the wrong direction and turned around. Upon reaching the intersection where we made the wrong turn, we encountered a farmer on a tractor that must have been 50 years old and decided to ask directions to verify our sense that we had been going the wrong way. He had to turn the tractor off to hear us and after a short discussion wasn’t sure the tractor would start again. It started immediately, but then he decided he wanted to know more about what we were doing and turned it off again. After a much longer discussion, the tractor started reluctantly and the farmer tooled off in the direction from which we had come and we rode on to Mattoon, the next town on our way to Shawano (pronounced by the farmer “Shaw-no.”

Despite the distance, today’s ride was easier than any in the previous 5 days; relatively few hills and only one quite long and granny gear steep hill. At the top, we saw a sign for a family ski area intoning “think snow.” Unfortunately, I (Jim) have developed a little numbness in his left hand and weakness in the right. Time for new gloves and more attention to regularly changing hand/arm position.

Len wants me to tell you about the two trucks that passed us going like bats out of hell. They smelled so bad it was like the drivers were trying to get away from the contents they were hauling. Why the second truck was following the first so close, I’ll never understand. There were several pipes sticking out of the backs of the tank trailers covered with brown stuff, presumably pig feces. Never want to smell anything like that again.