There's more than corn in Indiana...

There's soybeans too!

We woke up to a Winamac sunrise, inside our tents and content that the next step would be easy, a 60-miler up into Chesterton, IN. Jon had spread the news that we would have a tailwind and the weather.com reports of 30 to 40 mph winds from the south with gusts up to 50 confirmed that. It would be a great day for heading north. Not so for heading west, however, with near unmanageable crosswinds. It seems that trucks, semi-trailers especially push a lot of air, and depending on their direction of travel relative to your travel, will either blow you off the road or suck you towards the vacuum they drag behind them. So needless to say, it was hard to stay balanced on a two-lane state road with little margin that just happened to be designated a bike route for some reason. Luckily the corn stopped and the little bit of longitudinal travel ended quickly.

We got into Valparaiso around 11:25 our time, literally we could see the ominous tower of some building at the University there rise up into our horizon, and we figured that our route shouldn't be on US 30, a six-lane busy highway. So we stopped at a gas station on the corner and realized that somewhere in our travel, we had gained an hour having passed the invisible line that divides rural Indiana from civilized, Chicago-ized Indiana. We were hungry, so Dan, Andrew, Drew, Keith, Brian, and I waited outside of Wendy's until 10:30 when it it finally opened and feasted to our newly gained span of time. It being 11:25 again, we headed into Valparaiso proper and did not stop for long, figuring we would make it to our destination right quick, and we were right, speeding as fast as our legs and the wind would push us in the general direction of Lake Michigan. The six of us were the first to arrive at the New Life Wesleyan Church in Chesterton. Upon the arrival of the rest of our team, one of the pastors gave us the choice of piling into the church's 15-person van to take us to the Indiana dunes, which the lot of us accepted with great enthusiasm.

The water was cold, the sand was coarse, hot, and abrasive when it blew, but the beach in general was excellent. Jon chased me up a sand dune and running up that pile of sand made me more tired than I had been in a while, so in other words, it felt great. Later I took a nap in a hole someone had dug and first was covered in sand by the wind and then my teammates, who revelled in taking a picture with my disembodied head in the sand. So I was covered in sand and probably had swallowed a bit, not to mention it being in my eyes and ears and nose and over the bike shorts I hadn't changed out of. The pastor then took us to the local Y so we could shower and otherwise not be covered in sand.

I'm very excited for tommorrow, we're actually biking into Chicago, ending up at Millenium Park, but first have to go through some of the lovelier parts of Northwest Indiana along its lakeshore to get there. And there's a constant headwind. And our preparation for tommorrow and getting our bikes and belongings ready is fairly convoluted but simple enough if you sit down and think about it, which no one has time for. So, for all these reasons, I'm excited.