Next stop - Oberlin

Today our journey took us from Trenton in Michigan to Oberlin in Ohio. We started south on I-75. As much as we don't like these roads, they are the best way to get out of built up areas. Every time I passed a truck I would speed up, remembering the truck tyre we saw explode a week or so ago, and not wanting to be alongside one if it let go. The sides of the road were littered with tyre debris, proving this is not a particularly rare event.

After 50 miles we reached Toledo at the southwest tip of Lake Eerie. We gladly turned off I-75 and headed east on Ohio 2.

It was a fairly hot day, so we stopped at a roadside diner for cold drinks. There were two large pinboards on the walls covered in photographs everyone of which was of grinning people with guns and dead deer. They obviously like their huntin' an' shootin' in these parts.

As we continued east we passed a nuclear power plant.

Further on we could see rain ahead. The road, which showed a few damp patches at first became wetter as we closed on the storm.

Somehow we managed to stay between and behind the rain. When it finally looked as if we were about to ride into it, we stopped for lunch at a little diner. The waitress said the rain had been very heavy, so we had done well to avoid it.

We reached Nick and Elizabeth's home in the early afternoon. Their boys Jordon, Joshua and Samuel were happy to see us again, and all wanted to put on our motorcycle clothing and helmets and have their photos taken on our motorbike.

Nick cooked us Beef Wellington for dinner, and we spent the evening catching up on things that had happened since we stayed with them a year ago. Nick is a master stone carver. Last year he was finishing off the last of four huge marble lions for the Utah State Government. This job seems to have cast him as a "carver of lions" - at present he is waiting for two blocks of red sandstone to arrive from China to be carved into lions to grace a bank building, and there is the possibility of more to come. He is likely to have a busy year, which is really good.

Towards the end of the evening Nick had to finish packing for a trip to Arizona tomorrow morning. He is teaching a stone carving course there next week.