Day 15 - July 6 - Mattoon IL to Champaign IL - flat as a pancake.

 Weather - 72F (22C) at 8am with 100% humidity so it was foggy.  The sun finally broke through the gloom around noon and it got a bit steamy. The high temperature (84F/30C) would have been fine but the humidity remained high, giving a heat index of 95F (35C). The wind was a head wind all day, from the north and gusty at times in the afternoon.  By then, I had reached Champaign-Urbana so it did not matter much.

Distance: 59.9miles (96.4kms)

Average Moving Speed: 12.0mph (19kph) but quite meaningless since it was about 13.5mph on the road and much slower around town and campus.

Calories Burned: 2169.

Elevation Gained: 791 feet (241meters)

Shvitz Index: 5/10.  The north wind was cooling though it was annoying and slowing me.   But the day was warm and humid enough to be a classic central Illinois July day.   I drank about 4 liters of water with electolytes, a pint (half liter) of chocolate, a large fizzy something, an energy drink, and a couple of beers later.

My plan was to get to Champaign-Urbana by lunchtime and I just about made that goal, though I was slowed by the north head wind and a long rest in Arcola.  The day amounted to about 45miles on US45 - most of it without a shoulder but with little traffic since I-57 parallels the old highway.  Then about 15 miles riding around the Twin Cities visiting old haunts.

 The term "Flat as a pancake' is often used to describe east- central Illinois and it's accurate enough. It was also the title of the first record album from Head East, a rocker band from Urbana that I heard often in the clubs in the early-mid 1970s.

Head banger music here in the link from the 1970s if so inclined ----

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI8Vg53nuF4

The profile for the day leaves no doubt about the elevation change - I hardly changed gears except to exercise my legs in a different way.

after about 25 miles on the highway, I pulled off to re-visit the small town of Arcola, which designated itself as the "BroomSweep Capital of the US".  It has managed to avoid the sharp decline of most small US towns by remaking itself as a kind of kitchy-antique town  with all sorts of tschotchkes around the theme of corn broomsticks.  I once ran in the Broomcorn festival 10k race here. Like many local races in the 1980s, the local community sponsored an early morning race before the festivities of the day. Typically, we ran 5k out into the steamy cornfields and 5k back into the finish on the main drag.

I made a second stop in Tolono, about 10 miles south of Champaign and discovered a memorial to Abraham Lincoln's stop here on his way to Washington DC for his inauguration in 1861.  Apparently he visited Tolono 18 times in his years as a local lawyer and later as a politician as a railway line from Springfield Il intersected here with the main Chicago-New Orleans line.

Then it was onto the mostly empty campus of the University of Illinois where I got my first job out of grad school and then stayed for 15 years.  While most of the campus is very familiar, many new developments have changed the character of the buildings. Memorial Stadium has been 'modernized" and it's not a good look.  Long gone is the athletic track inside where we used to do training sessions by running 12 x 400 meter intervals in 65-70 seconds. (Long gone too are the days when I could complete that workout).

The Quad was empty but I was pleased to see some students still playing Frisbee there

The exterior of Davenport Hall - which used to be the home of the Geography Department - has not changed.  But the interior has/is undergoing a remodeling.

I stopped by my old office but it appears that there is some sort of remodel into classrooms underway at the present time

Then it was time to ride past our home in west Urbana, on Ohio Street, in the 'veggie ghetto' as the neighborhood close to campus was colloquially known.

The exterior looks like the day we moved out 38 years ago.

I retraced my old bike commuting route to north Champaign (before we moved to Ohio street) and saw the long closed Art Theater for sale.  The building, including the cinema, is yours for $699, 000.