Day 33, Madison to Garden Prairie, Illinois (The S is silent stupid) 94miles

Best: Getting into a fast paceline with 10 miles to go and blowing through the final miles.

Worst: The mosquitos in our campground are super voracious.

Most Unexpected: The number of rolling hills after leaving Madison.  I thought it was all flat.

We got a late start today because we ate at the dorm and they didn't open until 7:00. We found our way somehow out of Madison and entered a very steady stream of hills, up and down.  Nothing extreme, but not much flat either. It was a pretty uneventful ride and I didn't take many pictures because you have seen it all before. We are going to have some pretty flat days coming up as our mileage for the six days of riding is pretty high. We traveled from Oregon to Brooklyn in less than an hour (the cities that is), and the temperature stayed nice.  We did a lot of right, left, right, left turns so we couldn't catch up on our sleep while we were riding.

We have a small area of grass for our group tent set up, and all of the mosquitos seem to know this area as a place to down a quick pint. 

Those aren't shadows from the trees, those are the shadows from the mosquitos.  Okay, maybe I exaggerate a little.

This is right next to where we are camping, so if you want to come visit us, you will know where to go. The railroad tracks are about 50 feet away from my tent.  We will definately know when a train goes past us. After todays pictures, I will give a brief lesson on the all important q sheet, so stick around.

This is an original homestead house from 1859,  In California this would be a house open to the public to see how life used to be, here, somebody still lives in it.  

I thought this was a cool mailbox so I stopped to take a picture of it. The real reason is that I was barely hanging on to the group I was riding with, so this was my excuse to stop.  If you look real close, you can see one of the riders on the road just below the chickens thingamajig.

Hey look, I caught up with the group after all.

The things we share the road with.  This farm equipment took up more than half the road, and Lisa in front of me was yelling at me to take the picture.  The trick was to do this without getting run over. 

Okay, the q, or cue sheet.  Below is the first page of two for todays ride. 

If you turn your head sideways you will see the ride at the top of the page, what day is is, the miles for the ride, and the C miles, or cumalative.  The miles on the left side are between turns, the next column is the miles from the start of the day, and then the direction which you are supposed to follow.  There are some notes just to make it that much more interesting.  People actually use these sheets to get from point a to point b, however, I have something called a GPS which I loaded my ride from 2012, so I just follow what it tells me.  Unfortunately it tells me to do exactly what I did in 2012 and I made a few wrong turns that year, so I have to remain vigilant to not just take every turn recommendation. So endeth the lesson.