Streator, Illinois - Or perhaps not.
I was warned about northern Illinois. And, more to the point, I spent four years of college in northern Indiana. So I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.
It's dull. Flat. It's like Montana without vistas, like Iowa without contour lines. It's not excessively flat, but just flat enough that you can't really see anything to either side of you except corn, or possibly soybeans. That's it. Corn and soybeans, and the occasional town with a few services catering to those who deal in corn and soybeans. Good, salt-of-the-earth people, no doubt, but that doesn't make the state any prettier.
I have been in Streator (that's pronounced 'streeter') for an entire day now. That's not by choice. To understand why, I offer this brief recap of the maintenance history of the posterior of my bicycle. Feel free to skip this part if you want and jump to the end, where I explain the basic problem: my rear wheel and tire are both completely shot.
a. Somewhere in perhaps Montana, I notice that my rear rim is starting to disintegrate, apparently rent asunder by some poorly designed or installed spokes. I also notice a lot of wear and tear on the rear tire. I shrug and move on.
b. Minot, North Dakota: I replace my brake pads, worn out after so many mountain descents. I have to buy an inferior set for the rear because that's all they have left in stock.
c. Itasca State Park, Minnesota: I notice it's gotten worse. I play with the wheel and manage to get it running straight. 50 miles later, it starts to go seriously wobbly on me.
d. Grand Rapids, Minnesota: I take the wheel in to a bike shop, where the proprietor declares both it and the tire as completely shot and in dire need of replacement. I concur, and am back on the road 1 hour, a $50 rim and a $36 tire later.
e. Stillwater, Minnesota: Riding the brakes down a long hill, I hear a loud bang and discover my rear tire is flat. One of the crappy brakes came loose and rode along the tire instead of the rim, blowing a hole in both the tube and my 2-day-old tire. I replace the tire (again). I replace the brake pads (again).
f. Wisconsin, Southern Minnesota and Iowa: I blow four spokes on my new rear wheel inside of a week.
g. Outside Henry, Illinois: Yesterday, I was ascending a long hill when I noticed a strange bump on the rear tire. I examined it to find the outer tread was actually separating, leaving nothing but a thin layer of plastic over the tube. It is, to use bike terminology, majorly screwed up.
I empty half the air from the tire and limp into Streator (in late afternoon with a thunderstorm brewing, naturally), which according to my tour maps has a bike shop. It doesn't. It has a former bike shop and a guy who's still trying to sell off the random odds and ends from the inventory in his garage. Luckily enough, I find the guy, who declares that my rear tire is completely screwed up. He sells me the only one he has left that nominally fits my tire for $5.
So here I am. I'm 50 miles from the nearest bike shop, I have a nonfunctioning rear wheel and a tire that I can barely ride on. It is at this point that I decide to do what I should have done back in Grand Rapids, which is evoke that magic document, The Warranty.
I call up Trek, the maker of my bike, and am told they can replace the stuff for free, but that it can only be shipped out to an authorized Trek dealer. The closest one, as I mentioned, is 50 miles away. They recommend that I arrange it with the shop from which I bought the bike to have the wheel (the tire doesn't seem to be covered, unfortunately) delivered to them, then have them ship it to me.
So, to clarify: The Trek company, which is based in Wisconsin, wants to ship my wheel to Alaska so it can be forwarded to Illinois. Which means I get to twiddle my thumbs in Streator for, what, about a week?
Needless to say, this led to me pretty much exploding at the Trek guy on the phone. After sitting down and thinking about it for a while, I hit on what seemed like the only logical solution: figure out where the closest Trek dealer to Streator is, and have the stuff shipped there, then ride out on my awful replacement wheel and tire to pick it up.
The place is Bradley, Illinois, 50 miles from here. Somehow, the bike shop guy there managed to talk Trek into letting him build a new wheel from scratch, which he plans to give to me tomorrow after I limp over there. The tire, I get to pay for (again - for those keeping track, this is tire #4.) Fortunately, it's a straight shot down one highway from here to there, so if the bike dies it should be an easy hitch. I hope.
Has there been a bright spot in all this nonsense? I suppose its the people I'm staying with. I pulled into the only campground anywhere near Streator yesterday during a violent thunderstorm. It's actually a long-term RV Park, but the owners are pretty genial toward cyclists, so they charged me $5 to stay there and let me set my tent up under their pavilion instead of out in the rain. They then proceeded to give me a bunch of bottled water and iced tea, and today foisted both sandwiches and donuts on me. Even more importantly, they've let me use their office phone to coordinate this entire wheel replacement debacle.
So when I think back about crossing Illinois, I hope I don't think about the endless blah of cornfields and the agony of mechanical failures. I hope I think about them.

P.S. Kudos to everyone who got the Sufjan Stevens reference.