Day 142: Like a Walk in the Rain

John Denver said it pretty good in his Annie’s Song about filling up your senses. On this walk, I’ve spent a night in a forest, I’ve seen the mountains in Springtime, and today I took a walk in the rain. I’ve also seen a storm in the desert and in Bodega Bay, I saw a sleepy blue ocean.

This morning we woke again to the sound of rain and I got started a little late because of it. I started walking through Carthage and when I got out of town, the shoulders were wide enough that traffic didn’t bother me. I then hit a four-lane portion of US 136 and then I got my wish from yesterday – I got smack dab in the middle of new road construction and paving of the old road. Now normally this would have created a problem that I would just have to deal with, but today, no one was working because of the rain and I walked the new portion all by my lonesome. In some places I had a forty-foot wide ribbon of asphalt to myself and all the traffic could do was pass me and look. It was pretty nice. Now, I’m past that I think, and I am in Colchester, IL. Tomorrow we set out for a small town called Table Grove and are actually taking a route change to bypass Macomb and to alleviate some of the traffic. Should be fun.

It finally stopped raining this afternoon and turned quite nice. On the cool side for August and a bit humid, but we managed. So far, other than some of the roads, I’m real impressed with Illinois. The picture below is another friend of Valda’s taking a bath and a sign at the Mississippi River telling about the eagles. Speaking of eagles, I must have seen about 40 or 50 as I crossed Nebraska and Iowa. They liked to set on top of phone poles and flew from one to another as I approached. They would not let me get too close before they would fly off to the next pole. Some of the eagles would do this eight or nine times before flying off.