The story of this cross-state trip came down to one thing: extreme weather. We were riding the OTET – that’s the Ohio (River) To (Lake) Erie Trail. It’s a 326-mile “trail” from Cincinnati to Cleveland, but it’s not a continuous line from one end of the state to the other. It’s a combination of many different trail parts combined with on-street riding for the 35 or so miles where there is not a dedicated trail. It’s still quite impressive that we were able to traverse 90% of the state on (mostly) paved trails, and no cars!

Our six days of riding and would be too much for one post, so I’m splitting the story into three-day blocks.

Our tour is with Wilderness Voyageurs (voyageur=French-Canadian fur trappers). We meet up with our guides and the ten other fellow “voyagers” (voyager=someone who takes on a long adventure) early on Sunday morning.

It’s an 8:30 meet-up at a park where many of us will leave our vehicles for the week. It’s blazing HOT already and we have to get all the bike rentals ready, meet and greet and go through the safety talk. By the time we are ready to start our 56-mile ride, it’s almost 10am. It’s also 90 degrees with a heat index near or at 100 degrees.

So day one is a long, hot ride. If not for the shaded tree-covered parts for much of the day, I don’t know how we all would have made it through. Our ride time was just under four hours but our time in the extreme heat was over six hours. I understand that we were signed up for the “tour” pace…but when we finished this ride (after 4pm), we were toasted…definitely “overcooked”!

No one can predict the heat dome or the extreme conditions, but I don’t believe there were any efforts to move the timeline earlier for the next morning. We had a lovely seated breakfast at the beautiful hotel that we were driven to the day before. This translated to 8AM breakfast, a drive back to Xenia Station, bike unloading and another ride start just before 10am. It was 86 degrees and the high on our 57-mile day was around 93.

A lot of sun, and probably not as much shade as day one.

We rode into Columbus, the capital city, somewhere around 4pm and near collapse. The over-air conditioned lobby of the magnificent Hotel LeVeque revived us somewhat. 

Day three had us ride out as a group for a photo at the state capitol. We started riding at around 9:30 when it was 85 degrees. My research tells me that the high temp for day three was 95 (which was just a few degrees below the all time record high for this date). Our destination for this day was 52 miles away in Mt. Vernon. On this ride we passed the midpoint of the trail, the geographical center of the Buckeye state and the highest point of elevation on the Heart Of Ohio Trail.

We were still out in the heat until around 4pm, but ending the ride with fluffernutter frozen custard certainly helped cool things down.

The incredibly creative dog fountain was certainly something to see in Mt. Vernon. Roger wanted to go for a dip…but he obeyed the signs which said not to go in (rumor has it everyone in our group didn’t follow the rules)!

Next up: we buck the system to beat the temperatures, and the evil heat dome meets its arch enemy…rain!