I completed my trek. My day around Cincinnati was the hardest day on this leg of the trip. I rested longer than I would have liked the next morning, but it was warranted. Between that and a resupply run it put me in camp late the next day - the same place I waited out the wind storm before. It is a nice place so I stayed 2 nights so I had a day to catch up on rest and to get cleaned up. The campground is winterized already so all that is around are porta-jons. No showers or running water. With my water filter bag I can get potable water from streams. However I don't like doing that unless I have to (midwest rivers have pollution that mountain streams don't - two different environments). I do, however, use the filtered water for cleaning tasks so I am not using tap or bottled water up. On this trip that has been crucial - I had to resort to consuming filtered water on the northern end of the trek, not the end of the world, just not ideal (and that is exactly why I have a filter system - I can get drinkable water if I can't find it). With my 2 rounds of sitting at the campground on the way down and the return on the way back up - I ran off some extra water so I could take a bath and wash my hair. The stay on the way up I even got 2 loads of laundry done. There was no laundromat around, and even if there was one I wasn't going to break camp to spend 4 hours sitting at a laundromat. I heated the water over the camp fire for my baths. Worked great, considering the circumstances. Though, getting home, taking a shower, and putting on real fresh clothes is definitely better!
All said and done I got back in 3.5 moving days (4.5 days total, with the day off, the 1/2 day being the day I rode to the end of the route and flipped around - 1/2 there, 1/2 back basically). Yesterday I had a tail wind and did 54 miles so that was a big help. That is getting up towards double the mileage I would have liked to do in a day - just not my style. With the wind it was possible. That was a wind mostly out of the west going mostly east. However, today - the last leg of the trip was almost all due north and I had a stiff head wind - plus dropping temperatures.