The Rest of Iowa and crossing the Mississippi

After Winterset we had about another week in Iowa. The rides were all very similar: rolling hills with lots of cornfields. But it was better than Nebraska because the farms were smaller and it was a lot more visually interesting. Plus there weren't many days during which we had bad headwinds. We stayed at a couple camps in Des Moines and Dubuque, which was interesting because they were staffed mostly by college kids from England and Ireland. Evidently there's an organization that staffs all those camps for kids with disabilities and recruits students from overseas.

We had rain on two other days in Iowa: going into Iowa City where University of Iowa is located and again on the way to Davenport. On the ride to Davenport I crashed for the first (and hopefully only) time of the trip. I was riding fifth in a paceline of six when Ray, the third guy, accidentally dropped a wheel off the road down onto the gravel shoulder (did I mention the fact there are no shoulders on the roads anywhere in Iowa). He tumbled over and Matt, who was directly behind him, couldn't avoid him and neither could I. I also couldn't swerve out into the road to avoid it because there was a truck right behind us. So I crashed right into them. Ryan who was behind me was able to drop down off the road on the right and missed the whole crash. Fortunately no one got injured and there were no serious bike damages. Just Matt bent him shift lever and I have two big, nasty bruises on my thigh. But I'll take that any day if that's as bad as it gets.

From Davenport we rode across the Mississippi into Illinois. It was really cool to ride across the Mississippi because it's one of the largest rivers in the world and has been so important in the history of our country. Plus I've always thought of it as one of the major dividers between the east and the west. So it was a great landmark to cross. The first day in Illinois had a couple long climbs that I actually really enjoyed, then in turned into rolling hills. The hills were really dangerous because there was no shoulder, the road was really bad, there was a ton of traffic, and the rolling hills made it hard for cars to see ahead. Fortunately we made it through okay, but the highway patrol told us we couldn't ride the remainder of the day due to minimum speed limits on the road ahead, so unfortunately we had to rack and only got to ride about 65 miles when we were supposed to do 110.