America By Bicycle: Today was good

Today we were riding in Ohio which is NOT MOUNTAINS. We climbed no hills and it was great. We started our day with a delicious breakfast at the hotel and repacked our panniers. The fellow diners were nice and we gave out some of our little business cards with our websites.

About 10 miles into our ride we passed the first bike shop of the trip. Such a good stop! I got some new (sorely needed) tired and replaced my brake pads. I also picked up some new gloves. They were curious to see if my chain and wheels make the journey (racing wheels and a badly worn chain). The owners were super nice and have us a loaf of homemade bread and some newly expired sports drink tablets. Yum!

They also told us a way to get out of town on some great back roads and avoid all the highways.

Literally the only traffic we had to worry about was farm equipment.. What is this thing?!

We passed a Honda manufacturing plant, which is cool.

There were cows EVERYWHERE. They would just stop and look at us. All of them, staring. It was super weird. For one herd I stopped and called them over with my cow powers.

We also stopped at this little farm market that was having a big beer and wine tasting event. They also had tons of food samples. We tried everything. Several times. Lots of steak too. The people there were amazingly friendly and three nice ladies by the raspberry food company, robert farms. They even gave us a bunch of jars of their spreads to take with us. It was so nice.

Someone we were talking to also have us excellent turn by turn directions to our campsite. There were about 15 little tiny roads we had to take and he knew all of them in a deep country accent.

Someone else also came up to us and started talking vaguely about his bike touring experiences. We asked him to take a picture of us and did. (Never seen an iPhone though so we had to coach him through it. ) He said he has taken over thirteen thousand pictures in his life. He asked if we wanted a picture with the band and we said okay. He then walked over to the band and started taking pictures of them without us. It was the strangest thing. .

Here is his best one.

We got into camp around 8 and went to sleep late around 10. We put all of our food in one of the waterproof panniers because we were warned about the "vicious 'coons" that would eat us.