Days 18 & 19: Wilmington, IL to Chicago, IL

• Distance: 73.72 mi
• Elevation: 1,601 ft
• Dedication: Uncle Tim and Nancy Natoli and her family
• Ride group: Eli, Chase, Rose, and Grace
• Host: The Ormond family

I woke up yesterday morning next to the lake to the sounds of birds twittering as the sun was rising. I was worried about sleeping poorly out on the porch but it was so nice (not as nice as the deck spot Santi and Chase claimed, pictured below)! Unfortunately I was in charge of waking people up with Maggie again and slept through my alarm so we got a little bit of a late start, oops.

Collin’s family gave us a great breakfast and loaded us up with Liquid IV packets. My stomach was not very happy at the beginning of this trip and eating breakfast usually made me nauseous. This was the first morning I actually wanted to eat a lot of food in the morning and we had a great spread!

We had another beautiful day, much cooler than yesterday. We were once again on desolate back roads for the first half of the ride. Chase rode without hands for 8 miles and we took some fun pictures:

We were on a trail for most of the day after our second water stop and it was beautiful! We passed through several cute small towns that had great bike infrastructure. We made a few stops for essentials (coffee, carrot cake, and ice cream) and enjoyed the sights. The last few miles to our host were a little hillier but my group charged up them. It was a good day of riding.

On the 4K we have a little saying called “4KOK”, which is used when we chalk the routes to let riders know they’re on the right path. We also use it to describe things that would be weird in real life but are perfectly acceptable on 4K. Examples include half-heartedly washing your disgusting cycling gear in the sink each night, comparing saddle sores, eating three packs of pop tarts in a day, patching your tire with a postage stamp, and skipping the lunch stop to get ice cream. My group did the last two today– Eli managed to stop a leak with a stamp he had on hand for some reason, and we skipped lunch to stop at a cute ice cream shop that had Moose Tracks, my favorite!

We’ve spent the past two days with an amazing host, Mary Ormond and her family. Mary is currently fighting stage 4 breast cancer and has participated in Ulman’s Cancer to 5K program. She actually became a host for 4K riders after randomly seeing a team out on her road a few years ago and offering to let them use her bathrooms– that’s just the kind of person she is! I admire her outlook and sense of humor when it comes to her diagnosis, and she and her husband and three daughters have made us feel so at home. The girls made everyone name tags and at a certain point stopped receiving spelling tips from the riders helping them, so I was dubbed Laren for the night. We had a pretty late night out in the yard playing never have I ever and some other games.

Their house is a bit far from Chicago so this morning we all loaded up in the vans to check out the city. I went in with the later group and after a miraculously easy parallel parking job with the van (kudos to Jake) we immediately went for some deep dish pizza! Casey, MJay, Jake, Chase, and I stopped at Giordano’s and got so much food. I was a little iffy about the pizza but still wanted to try it and it was delicious!

After lunch we met up with a larger group at The Bean, which was so cool! It was a lot bigger than I expected and it kind of made me dizzy looking at it. Then we walked down to the lake and around the river walk before heading back to the van before our parking expired. We hoped to finally get the blinker fixed on the host van with no luck… the saga continues.

Back at the Ormond’s we had a great dinner and just hung out for a few hours. Our rest day did not end up being very restful so most of us were down for a chill night. A small group stayed in the city to see a concert and I offered to pick them up from the train station at 12:30 AM– I ended up having to set an alarm because I physically could not stay up that late. Tomorrow we have a really short ride (basically another rest day lol) and I think we’re all looking forward to some extra sleep and rest time!

Until then,

Lauren