A siren woke me up last night around 2am. The same sort of siren a town would use for a tornado warning or similar emergency.
But I was too tired to think about it or investigate.
My campsite for the night.
It happened again once I started packing up my tent. Adding to the eeriness was the dense forest I chose as a camp site.
Eerie with a siren, beautiful without.
I asked the clerk at the local gas station what the siren meant. She said the fire department and ambulance personnel used it when there was an emergency. Instead of having the staff on call, the siren woke them up.
I suppose that is how it works in a small town.
The wind was blowing south, deciding my direction for the morning. Conveniently, the route took me through more farming communities, which is a much nicer ride than the state highway.
However, Google was not aware that one of the roads was closed.
I'm sure I could have taken the road, but it was all loose gravel. No thanks.
The detour pushed me ten miles further south, right into Ohio!
The lazy farm road took me all the way into Toledo, where suddenly the landscape morphed from fields to a massive pit mine, than finally a sprawling city.
But thankfully, Ohio has an extensive system of bike paths, including one that runs from the western outskirts of the city, about six miles into the heart of the university.
Aside from the awful roads (a recurring theme in these big cities that get a lot of snow), Toledo was nice. Although I didn't plan on staying.
I briefly stopped at the Black Cloister Brewery to sample their IPA. I ended up talking to the bartender, Lauren, for quite a while. Her regular gig is teaching English to middle school students. She has an interesting curriculum though - instead of mandating a list of books to read and book reports to complement, she lets the students choose the books they want to read and the type of project to show their comprehension.
Lauren said that so many of her students chose to write songs, or other musical interpretations of the books they read, that she had a piano permanently installed in her classroom.
That seems like an engaging teaching method for critical thinking.
Lauren, you're an inspiring teacher - keep it up!
Crossing the bridge...
From there I cruised out of Toledo to the small town of Elmore where another bike trail started. This one, another defunct railroad now paved over, ran as far as the eye could see in a straight line.
Remnants of the old railway at the start of the bike trail.
Somewhere in the middle, I found a nice little canopy complete with a bench. What a perfect place to camp.
Joe