Day Forty - 2nd half of Indiana and Kentucky

We got off to a flying start this morning at 6:45 AM. That's important because we are getting anxious to get home and the more miles we can get in a day, the less days we have to be out on the road.
We did need to fuel up, but that was right on the way out. It was 61 degrees at the hotel, but it dropped down into the mid 50's several miles down the road. Our extra layer of gear was good enough to handle that.

Day 40 Track

We had just a 4 mile hop on I-69 until we turned west on Hwy 26. We would ride a LOT of back roads today, many of them county roads so I won't name every single road in the blog. It took us just another 20 minutes from the interstate exit to get to our first checkpoint for today - the Madison County line for the Presidential Tour.

Madison County - Presidential Tour

Just another 40 minutes later, as we were headed west on IN-28 we would capture our 2nd checkpoint of the day - the Clinton County line - for the Presidential Tour. It's 8:00 AM and we already have 2 of our checkpoints - life is good!

Clinton County - Presidential Tour

We would continue west on IN-28 out to Frankfort where we then turned south onto IN-39. We stayed on 39 down to IN-47 where we turned west towards our next checkpoint - Thorntown, IN. That will be the "t" in Strange for the Team Strange Airheads 30 tour.

Thorntown, IN - "t" in Strange for ts30gt

Coming out of Thorntown, we are running south on IN-75. There would be some jogs and actual curves in the road as we went by interstates and crossed over railroad tracks. We would go through he towns of Advance, Jamestown, North Salem and Coatsville.  We rolled into Fillmore at 9:35 AM. While we were getting our photos, a nice local driver passing by asked if we wanted him to take a photo of us together. We gratefully declined but it was nice chatting with him even though briefly.

Fillmore, IN - Presidential Tour

From Fillmore we would start working back south-easterly, mostly by going south a bit, then east for a bit longer, etc. There were no diagonal roads going southeast, that is, until we got to Martinsville where we were supposed to run on I-252 which was a diagonal road, but as we were coming out of of the town we ran into a detour for 252, so we ended running east for quite a way on IN-44 all the way out to IN-135 before then dropping south and then 135 turned back westerly and eventually met us back up with 252 in Morgantown. The detour ended up actually being a pretty nice road to ride, and it ran us right into our next checkpoint - the Johnson County line for the Presidential Tour.

Johnson County - Presidential Tour

We would continue south on 135 on down through Nashville and it was all nice riding. 135 would now take us along the edge of the Hoosier National Forest. Once again we would run into another detour and it also turned out to be as nice a road as the one we got routed around. Eventually, we came through a section of the forest and along here we caught our next checkpoint - the Jackson County line - for the Presidential Tour.

Jackson County - Presidential Tour

 After the Jackson line we would exit out the south side of the National Forest and then run east over to the town of Brownstown.  There we found a nice little home town cafe and got an honest to goodness real meal complete with choice of three vegetables. It was quick too, thanks to the fact that we ordered the daily special. That meant we were back on the road pretty quickly.

After lunch we continued south on 135 all the way down through Salem and into the town of Palmyra where we would pick up US-150 and head south-east towards Louisville, KY where two more checkpoints awaited us.

We crossed over the Ohio River and into Kentucky at 2:12 PM. It didn't take long to find the post office and get our photos of that - Louisville for the I've Been Everywhere tour.

Louisville - I've Been Everywhere Man Tour

Then, just less than a mile away we got the Louisville Slugger Museum for our Baseball tour.

Louisville Slugger Museum - Baseball Tour

That would be the last checkpoint for this day. We rode out the rest of the day rolling towards the Tennessee border, but that would have to wait for tomorrow as we stopped for the night in Somerset, KY.

It ended up being a near perfect riding day. It warmed up nicely, but never got too hot. A few clouds appeared from time to time, but it never rained. We rode probably less than 30 miles of interstate so we were pretty happy riders.

Today's Stats: 414.6 miles in 10:58 elapsed time, 8:36 saddle time.