Day 50 - Saturday, June 28 - Boston, MA, to Grinnell, IA - 1250 miles by airplane

I shared a taxi with three other people to Boston Logan Airport. We drove through the "Big Dig" tunnel - an extensive freeway system under downtown Boston. It, greatly, relieved the congestion on the above ground streets and made it much faster to pass through the city - especially much faster to reach the airport. The Big Dig was in the news in recent years because of construction disasters and extravagant cost overruns.


I had a connecting flight in Milwaukee, WI, so the route out of Boston took my flight on a path over Syracuse, NY, where we had stayed six nights ago and also where my sister, Janet, lives. As I watched our progress over the terrain, I tried to visualize riding the distance on a bicycle. I'm not able, yet, to comprehend what we have done the last seven weeks. During the tour, one would hear rider after rider saying that they couldn't think of doing the overall trip as it seemed unattainable. We found that we had to only think of one day at a time. Each day, after riding a distance to the next overnight, most of us could not name the town that we had stayed in the night before. We were only focused on the day's destination. One day I was riding alone and a highway patrolman stopped to ask if I was lost. He asked where I was coming from and where I was going. I had to look at our route sheet to remind me. While riding, we get so lost in our thoughts that we lose track of everything else. We just make the turns called for on our route sheets and that gets us to our destination.

A typical "route sheet" that we used for our daily guidance. Left-click on the sheet for a larger view. We folded them in quarters and attached them to our handlebars - usually in a waterproof see-through pouch.

The Milwaukee, WI, airport.

Thanks for reading my blog during the tour and I have really appreciated your encouraging comments.

Bob