Day 75

No pictures today. I don’t know why I didn’t take any. Just didn’t come to mind…

When I woke up I put the news on to see the weather and it looked like a huge thunderstorm was going to pass through. We decided to wait it out and it was the right decision. We could hear it pass over us. Very heavy rains and thunder. While we were waiting we planned the day out. The weather forecast said that after the storm today was going to be “warm, humid, and unstable.” That became the theme of the day…

We chose to shoot for a 23 mile day and split another hotel in O’Fallon. We had some challenges to deal with. Some roads were unsafe and the weather could change at any moment out here. We went for it anyways.

After a couple of miles of hell, we made it to a larger road with a huge shoulder. Chris and I both celebrated loudly. We walked on that road for a good 10 miles probably. We went through a couple of small towns and breaked a couple of times. Nothing too exciting…

After about 14 miles into the day, we came up to the point in the road where the big shoulder ran out. There was about a 3 mile stretch of hell again. At the end of that particular stretch was a town called Lebanon. It was a really nice town and we chose to break for a while there.

We sat at a table outside of a store that was closed. While sitting there and snacking, the owner of the store came up and checked on us to see what we were up to. He was very interested in our stories and we talked for a while. He came back out with brownies and lemonade for us. Very nice guy. He warned us about the road that we had to go on up ahead and said we were pretty much going to die if we took it. We had no choice…

We were walking through a beautiful neighborhood on sidewalks and getting close to the road that we were going to die on. A guy out in his driveway hollered from across the street and was asking about what we were doing. We waited for traffic to clear and darted across to talk to him. He offered us some water but we kindly declined as we had just breaked and had plenty to get us to where we were going.

He also warned us about the road ahead. He thought about it and then offered us a ride to the other side. Chris and I looked at each other and both kind of realized that this was probably the safest thing to do. We were only missing a mile or two at the most. We gladly accepted and felt good knowing that we weren’t going to die anymore.

I was glad to meet that guy. It’s such a great experience to witness kindness of strangers firsthand. He helped us a lot. As we passed by in his truck, we realized that it would’ve been nasty to walk on that road. When he dropped us off, the road we were on was clear of traffic and we had about 5 miles to go.

We blasted through it so that we could get settled in. The town of O’Fallon is awesome. Really nice and sidewalks everywhere. We checked into the hotel with a coupon and it was only $27 a piece.  We jumped in the pool and then got ready for dinner at IHOP which is in the same parking lot. The walker gods were with us today.

Now it’s time for hockey and basketball playoffs before bed…