Day 12: Interstate Tour 2018
Loved it so much, I bought the magnet last time.
In the morning, I rolled for North Liberty, Indiana, home of Potato Creek State Park. I use I-80 quite a bit on my routes and was looking for a place to camp one summer when this place popped up on the "Oh, Ranger!" app. It's an eye-poppingly beautiful park that has been lovingly returned to its former status as an Indiana wetland. There's also a sweet 7.7 mile mountain bike trail and a pretty intense intermediate paved trail that's 3.3 miles.
As I approached the park, the constant drizzle had begun to intensify. Damn! The mountain bike trail would be sloppy and slippery. Would have to settle for the paved trail this trip, perhaps.
Once set up, I grabbed the bike and went off to check the status of the main reason I wanted to return here. Memory kicked into gear as I climbed the first hill out of the campground, "oh yeah, this is that place where the access roads are all ass-kickers", speeding around the corner and down to the lake to the mountain bike trailhead. I got about 200 feet in and encountered the first tire-sucking bog, literally noped right out of there and headed back towards the paved path. With winds projected, and delivering, at 12 mph, there was a slight chance that it could dry out by tomorrow and just be moderately a mud run.
Anyway, I had fun on the paved path. If you hit it right from the top of the Red Area, it's a full-on screaming roller coaster through the trees and I had to take it easy due to the slickness of the pavement (and the proximity of aforementioned trees.) At one point, I just had to slam on the brakes, get off the bike, grab my iPhone and take pictures of the most magnificent tree in an emerald cathedral.
Ultimately, between all the shows and festivals, the driving and the doing of business things, there's these moments that I live for. Way out in the Somewhere, going deep into the shrouded woods, farther away from the rush and the slam of the cities and even the rattle and hum of the towns. Quieter than the whispers of the villages, it's just you and nature and the absence of white noise is astounding. It amplifies your heartbeat and the ideas and thoughts that seem to shout loudly because everything around you is dialed down to zero.
Just. Wow.
It's earth energy, un-perverted, pure in its essence and surrounding you, cloaking you lovingly. I dream about days like this when I'm back home in the middle of the city.
Mmm.
Back in Imua, I shot a Mailbag Monday segment for my patrons, got it uploaded and then went back to work at organizing my Dulcimerica data. Some kind folks have offered to help, so I'm auditing all of the data and setting up a project file with all of the relevant information as well as the source files. This is also an opportunity to resolve duplication issues, retain original time stamps, cross each "t" and dot each "i", because the server would become unavailable in two weeks.
Well, as it turned out, my administrator didn't send all of the files and there were over 290 episodes missing. So, I called up both lists and painstakingly compared them, downloading only what I didn't already have in the archive. This is the kind of stuff that, if someone else asks you to do it, and you don't have anything invested in it, this kind of job sucks. However, because I'm borderline obsessive about these kinds of details, I was deeply invested in making sure that this worked out right, so brain-numbing as it might be, it was also sort of like an episode of CSI: Imua, where I'm comparing evidence and sources to build a fuller picture.
That took all night, and then I played Boggle With Friends with Jae and watched "Annihilation" because going deep into shrouded woods'll make you do that.