Day 76-77 Chicago to Valparaiso, Indiana

 

Day 76-77 Chicago to Valparaiso, Indiana

     Although hot, it was a beautiful bike ride from Chicago to Valparaiso.  I decided to break the trip into two days and spend the night in Lansing, Illinois.  It was my intention to camp, but when I rested a half hour before the campsite, the oppressive heat combined with the cloud of mosquitoes attracted to me inspired me to get a hotel room.

     The extreme humidity caused my room door to swell and it did not close properly when I went to bed.  At approximately 2 a.m. someone walked into the room stating “There you are!”  I jumped out of bed and shouted “This is not your room.  You must leave now!”  He did not leave but approached me which made me extremely anxious.  “Don’t freak out” he said, “It’s me.”  I repeated my demand that he leave the room, but he came even closer and touched my arm.  “You must leave the room now!!!”  He asked me “Why do you keep saying that?”  This is an epistemological question for which I was not prepared.   I was pondering if I was socially required to answer the question when his cell phone rang.  He picked up, listened to the voice on the other end, hung up and left.  In the hour it took me to get back to sleep I was pondering if I should have thrown in my lot with the heat and mosquitoes. 

    Although much of the urban development along the southern shore of Lake Michigan has experienced the collapse of industry and subsequent depression, Valparaiso is a surprisingly lovely town.  I am grateful that Minna Harlan, a former parishioner from Switzerland was willing to host me for what turned out to be two nights.

     Minna had recently retired from JP Morgan Bank (the company for which she also worked in Geneva) and is extremely active in her retirement.  I am very grateful for her kind hospitality and her willingness to listen.  It appears that she, also, had a strange man wander into her apartment the very same night as my nocturnal interchange.  He had fallen asleep on her couch and woke her up when she heard him sneeze.  I have since been checking out the corners of rooms to see what other surprises are lurking there.

     She has two parallel lives; one with her German speaking parents and siblings in Hamburg and the other with her English speaking descendants in Indiana.   She seems to navigate these two environments with ease and takes joy in the occasional moments when they intersect.  There had been some more changes with my planned route, so she graciously allowed me to spend a second night there while I planned my next two weeks.

     While there, we spent an afternoon visiting Indiana Dunes National Park as well as the State park adjacent to it.  It was a beautiful place to for a hike on the sandy trails and to climb hills larger than I thought possible in Indiana.  I had lived in Central Indiana for two years as a child and never realized that there were beaches in the state which warned of dangerous undertow.  It is place of great natural beauty of a type that surprised and delighted me.  In cycling from Valparaiso to South Bend I was struck by some of the beautiful architecture of farm houses I passed.  These were miles apart from each other and most contained huge porches offering a view across their farms.  The weather was cooler, the bike paths were welcoming, and I was able to cover 60 miles that day (which is a big deal for me).