Sometimes the Best Plan is to Stick With the Plan

Sticking with the plan is not always the best course. It certainly wasn’t Thursday, when sticking with the plan would have meant riding in a downpour for hours.

But Friday afternoon, in beautiful Bellevue, Ohio, I thought the best plan was to go off route a bit and avoid a stretch of busy road. Boy, was that a mistake.

But before I get to that, Friday dawned a clear, cool beautiful day for riding. We had to deal with some road construction before we got 500 yards from the hotel, but after a brief detour, we were on course and rolling through the Ohio countryside outside of Bowling Green. For the first time on the trip, we started to see some fields of grain, and at one point the country road I rode along was no wider than a driveway.

The recent rains created a few speed bumps, like this point where I had to take off my shoes and socks and walk across water crossing the road.

The rains on Thursday and earlier in the year have devastated local farmers, and it appears that the damage is even more widespread than in South Dakota. I’d say over half the fields we saw yesterday were either unplanted or were planted but looked like this.

We stopped at a winery later in the day (see below), and the woman behind the counter said that the damage from rain is the big news in the area.

Eventually our route moved from agricultural lands to more residential and industrial areas closer to the shore of Lake Erie.

At lunchtime, we reached the city of Bellevue, an industrial town that clearly is suffering. The downtown main street looked nearly deserted other than through traffic on US Highway 20.

The highway traffic was enough, though, that I looked for a way to revise my route to avoid a choke point on the highway under a railroad bridge. After lunch, I set off on some side streets, where I started to run into more water covered roads. I thought I could pick my way around the water and the highway, but eventually came to a submerged road I had to walk across, and then ended up at a dead end in a railroad yard surrounded by chemical plants.

I retraced my steps (including those through the water-covered road) and rejoined the original route, but added 4 miles and about a half hour to the day. Clearly a case where sticking to the original plan was the best plan.

The rest of the afternoon we passed through lovely small towns — including Milan, OH, the birthplace of Thomas Edison — and more agricultural areas, including the first fruit orchards we have seen on the trip.

There was also this small, abandoned brick building in the middle of one field. I would have loved to know its story.

Toward the end of the ride, we reached Vermillion Winery, in the Vermillion River Valley. It was refreshing to have some European varietals after a string of wineries with only North American varietals. Their Cabernet Franc, Gewurtztraminer and Chambourcin (a French-American hybrid) were reasonably good, though i did not walk away with any bottles.