Southern Indiana Mini-Tour

The Berger’s Southern Indiana Mini-Tour – Spring Break 2012

Glenn and I took the opportunity to try out a self-sustained multi-day bike trip for spring break this year.  As this was our first time we decided to make it close to home in case we would happen to need a rescue.  Our planned route was to be 4 days of riding with each day approximately 60 miles.  As it turned out we modified the trip on the fly and made it into a 3 day trip with two approximately 65 mile days and one century.  We could not have asked for better riding conditions and we had a great time.

Tuesday we set off from home headed for Columbus.  Only 1.5 miles in we realized we had forgotten to pack our bike locks, so I turned around to get those while Glenn rode on ahead (he was carrying the load so I was able to catch back up to him at Mt. Gilead).  We chose to take a slightly longer, but in my opinion nicer, route to Columbus and went out to Gatesville instead of climbing Helmsburg Rd to Nashville.  We had a nice quiet ride on beautiful Brown Co. roads.  Shortly after passing Stone Head a rider from Columbus caught up with us and kept us company the rest of the way into Columbus.  He warned us of possible dogs, pointed out a reindeer farm as we approached, and rerouted us slightly for roads with better pavement than the route I had planned. We ended our ride with me showing 65 miles and Glenn at 62 miles at the Hotel Indigo in Columbus for the evening.  We soaked in the hot tub for a while, strolled around downtown, ate great burgers at Scotty’s, then had a relaxing evening in our room.

Wednesday we set off with our destination to be Clifty Falls State Park in Madison.  We fought a strong south wind all day and had to detour out to Hwy 3 one time when my route turned into gravel.  Overall though a nice ride with lots of horses and ponies scattered across the pastures.  We arrived at Clifty Falls around 2pm with about 65 miles showing for our trip.  Both of us needed to refuel a bit and get more water, but after a little rest and sightseeing around the park we decided to ride on to Scotsburg for the night. We headed out again and shortly after leaving the park my route once again found gravel.  We decided to trust our handy GPS to route us on to Scotsburg.  Unfortunately the best alternate to the gravel meant that we spent most of the next 30 miles on Hwy 56 which carries slightly more traffic than Hwy 45 toward Unionville does, but we finished the ride with 98.1 miles for the day.  We finished our first century of the year fighting a strong head wind most of the way and with Glenn hauling our gear!

Thursday morning we woke up to find the weather was not great for our start.  We had breakfast at the hotel and waited out the worst of the storm and the rain.  When we started out it was raining lightly, but lucky for us it stopped about 6 miles into our ride.  We shed our jackets and continued our trip toward Brownstown.  From the time we left Scotsburg until the outside of Brownstown we only saw about a dozen cars in the nearly 30 miles and it was smooth pavement the whole way! We stopped in Brownstown for a typical cyclist lunch at Subway and headed out.  We had 4 miles to travel on Hwy 50, then it was 135 to Freetown, 58 to Heltonville, and then we felt like we were nearly there with the last 20 miles on 446.  We arrived home around 3pm, just about an hour before the rain moved into Bloomington.

We had a lot of fun on our 3 day adventure, surprised ourselves on our ability to get back on and keep going, and surpassed any of our goals by completing a century on March 14!  If you have ever thought about trying a multi-day trip, I recommend starting with something easy like this.  Maybe next time we will get more adventurous or plan for a longer trip, but right now I am proud of what we did.

(Thanks to Charles C. for the loan of his trailer, which we did not end up using this time and to John B. for the use of his pannier bags.  It turns out that for a planned 4 days, 2 people really can fit all their gear in 2 panniers, 2 seat bags, and 1 frame bag if you pack wisely.  And the biggest thanks to Glenn for carrying the panniers!)

-Tammy Berger