I slept well last night. I was rested, I was fed, I was watching one of those awful Star Wars movies. I think the movie is what put me to sleep.

Breakfast at the hotel was interesting. There were boxes of cereal with random bags of cereal in them. I reached for the mini wheats and ended up getting cinnamon toast crunch. I guess that will do. Add a bagel and cream cheese and some coffee and I am set.

I am able to leave town by 7:15. It is nice and cool walking through town and there is a wonderful breeze. But today is supposed to be a pretty hot day.

You leave town on one of the rail trails and it is heavily wooded most of the way. We are hiking along the banks of the Kewanee River. I have loaded up with four and a half liters of water and Gatorade. I concentrate on drinking the water first because it is the only thing that I can replenish today.

A few hours into the hike I am actually passed by another hiker. He is a local who is section hiking 15 to 20 mile chunks at a time. He has a ride at the end of the rail trail so his pace is much faster than mine. I have to keep my speed down so that I don’t overuse any part of my body for a long day of hiking today.

The rail trail is about 14 miles long. And then it is about 20 more miles of continuous roadwalking. Where I will end up tonight I am uncertain but I am shooting for a restaurant in Ellisville that lets you camp in a field behind the parking lot.

By the time I get to the last point on the Kewanee River where you can get water, I discovered the slope is very steep. It is too steep for me to even think about trying to get water. If I had bothered to read the comments in the hiking app I would have seen that.

I have only gone through just over one liter of water so I’m not in dire need of it yet. There is still one more creek that I will cross about four miles into the road walk. I will concentrate on drinking as much water as I can before then so that I can make best use of refilling my bottles.

When the trail ends, there is a parking area with some picnic tables that I can drag under a tree for some shade. There is also a porta potty which is conveniently timed. I try and make a fairly long stop here and eat and drink as much as I can to be well rested before starting the road walk. By the time I leave it is still only 12:30 and I have already done 14 miles.

The road walk has absolutely no shade so the umbrella is a necessity at this point. Silly me makes a wrong turn before the first intersection. I turn one road too early and it has me bending back towards the way the trail had approached.

I see on the map that I can keep going and reconnect with the official route with probably only a half a mile of wasted travel. At this point that is better than backtracking to get back to where I should have turned.

The roads are very lightly traveled. They are through mostly corn and soybean with a few wheat fields and another grain I don’t recognize. They are at least nice roads to have to do a long road walk on.

After I get back on the official route I will only be going a mile further before I purposely turn a different direction to head to my destination in Ellisville.The official route is on smaller roads but takes an extra 2 miles to get to almost the same place I’m headed to.

Where I turn takes me on a larger road with more traffic including trucks. But I will only be on it for two and a half miles to Ellisville. After Ellisville I will be back on the official route and on small roads again.

About 1 mi from Ellisville I see a Lutheran Church with a ball field across the street from it. The church is in bright sun but the ball field has a heavily tree covered area and I can see picnic tables underneath. This is the perfect spot to make a decision whether to try and stop and Ellisville or to try and keep going.

If I try to camp at the bar then I only have one more mile to go. If I decide to go past the bar then I have 13 more miles to go. I decide to rest here for 30 minutes to see what my body tells me to do.

There is a big difference between a 20-mile day and a 32-mile day on the 4th day of a trip. By the time I am ready to leave my left foot is a little bit sore. That is the decision maker. I will try to stop in Ellisville.

When I get to Janda’s bar in Ellisville, I discover that it is packed wall to wall full of people. Apparently someone is having a retirement party tonight and it looks like the entire town is here to celebrate. I managed to find one seat at the very end of the bar and order a chicken sandwich and fries and end up drinking three glasses of water.

They are all very friendly inside and the bartender says it will be no problem if I wanted to camp in the field out back. The decision has been made. Out back the field is huge. It’s about the size of three football fields or even latger.

But more importantly there’s a few really large trees casting gigantic shadows where I can rest in the shade. I’m not even concentrating on setting up the tent yet I just want to go rest in the field. I rest in the field for at least 2 hours before even starting to make camp.

The traffic that goes by is very interesting. There are the typical teenagers in diesel trucks rolling coal as they drive down the street. But then there is also a hayride on a very sophisticated wagon with gates and railings all around it. Just another Saturday night in Wisconsin..

Emotion of the day, Nervousness

This will be my first big day of the trip. If things didn’t go smoothly then this could have been the first really, really big day of the trip. I was nervous not knowing if Janda’s would allow me to camp out back. I was nervous not knowing if I had enough water to actually make the distance to Jandas. I was nervous not knowing if I would be able to get water from the stream I intended to get it from. And I was nervous not knowing if my feet were ready for a long road walk at the end of the day.

As it turned out everything worked great. The location where I got water was fine. It was a bit of a bushwhack to get to the water but it wasn’t steep. And the water was a little cloudy but after I filtered it it tasted great. And the field at Janda’s turned out to be way nicer than I anticipated. So there was no need to be nervous after all. But I would rather be nervous than be too cocky and screw something up.