Day 34: Plymouth, IN – Merrillville, IN (8.6.24)

Good morning everyone, Now I have finally figured out why Chicago is also called the “Windy City”. That’s putting it mildly and should perhaps be renamed “Stormy City”. Today I’m making a stopover in Merrillville, a small town about 15km south of Lake Michigan and about 50km southeast of Chicago. Since the Chicago metropolitan region with its almost 10 million inhabitants begins here, Merrillville can almost be described as a suburb of Chicago. However, I will avoid Chicago itself because I don’t want to get into a firefight between rival drug gangs. Unfortunately, as a cyclist you are largely unprotected. The drive from Plymouth to Merrillville was again quite strenuous, although the wind today was only blowing at a maximum of 40kmh and not exclusively from the front, but mostly from the south. I didn’t have to turn once to do this, the US30 stayed true to my destination. On the way, I had the opportunity to hear the shrill noise of cicadas in the trees along the road, which from a distance sounds like an approaching freight train (when the tracks start singing), but up close becomes deafeningly loud. Thousands of cicadas lay on the side of the road. The news is talking about billions upon billions of animals that live in the ground for 17 years and then come out at the same time. What fascinating creatures.