Day 8: 16 Jan, 32.1 miles today, 432.7 miles total, Crestview, FL
The wind. Good god, the wind.
We slept behind the firehouse in DeFuniak Springs, eschewing the tent in favor of the cement pad with the big corrugated steel awning. It rained hard the first few hours after dark, the drops hammering on the roof with a giant, booming sound. It was loud, but what kept waking up me was the surprisingly frequent sound of the firefighters being called out on a job—that combined with all the streetlights in the community center parking lot. Still, it was manageable until the wind shifted, picking up substantially in ferocity as it changed direction to shoot straight down my sleeping bag. I’ve lived through this scenario before; it sucks having to get up to reorganize your sleeping situation, but then it’s fine. Except this time it wasn’t. I was sleeping on top of a picnic table, and so turning my bed around 180° was my only option. And it helped, but somehow I still got frigid gusts blowing under my quilt every couple of minutes. It made for a miserable, sleepless night.
Sean Meadow didn’t fare any better under the table. By the time the gray dawn broke, we were ready to be anywhere else: we were tired, cold through, and both in need of a bathroom now that we didn’t have the cover of darkness to shield us as peed against the building. We found a local nearby bakery, got hot food, got hot drinks, and got dressed into our cold, damp bike gear.
We had a head wind the entire day. It started bad, but gradually got worse by the afternoon. I was sweating under my layers from having to work so hard to move e the wind, but at the same time I was freezing from the bite in the air. By the time we’d gotten not even halfway to the warm showers house Sean Meadow had arranged the night before, we were done in: cold, tired, and fiercely unhappy. If we’d slept warm and well the night before, we might have been able to endure the full day with grim determination if not exactly good cheer, but as it was we just could face the idea of riding one mile farther. At lunch, we each admitted to the other that we didn’t want to ride anymore today, and we got ourselves a hotel room.
For me, the breaking moment was when we were routed across a two-lane bridge with no shoulder, with a steady stream of cars narrowly passing us the entire half-mile we were crossing the span. But even after we were clear of that nightmare, we were still on a busy four-lane road without a shoulder or even a sidewalk, angry motorists honking and making a big old fuss at having had to overcome the vanishingly small inconvenience of changing lanes for all of five fucking seconds to pass us.
Weather happens; sometimes it overwhelms you, though usually you can work through it. It’s the mental strain of having to dodge traffic every single day that I think it’s going to prove the harder obstacle to navigate. Motorists have absolutely no respect for the fact that their vehicles are not the precise machines they seem to believe they are—nor are they the precise operators they believe themselves to be. Cyclists get hit every day by drivers who clearly see them on the road, but grossly underestimate the space they need to execute a pass, or misjudge the timing of a turn. We do not maintain a high standard for drivers anywhere in the country; I just want to make it to the Pacific without having to bear the cost of that oversight.
The stress of riding in traffic is a familiar if uncomfortable feeling, like putting on an old pair of leg irons and trying to feel nostalgic for one’s time on a chain gang. I don’t like the person it brings out in me, the aggro, shouting, dick it all but demands I become. We take the entire lane when we need to, and when some bratty driver makes a big honkity bother while making a point of passing aggressively and close, I make a bother back at them. Like, asshole, you SPECIFICALLY are the reason we have to do this—you are exactly the person who can’t be trusted to pass us safety when we hew as close to curb as possible.
Dear drivers, take a moment for self-reflection when you find yourself filled with contempt for the health and safety of a fellow human being just because they’ve become a temporary and minor inconvenience to you. Is that truly the person you want to be? Think about it for a second: you know that whatever dumb place you’re headed isn’t worth the effort you’ve invested in getting there a few seconds early.
Day 9: 17 Jan, 65.8 miles today, 498.5 miles total, Pensacola, FL
Finally got off of US 90 for 20 blissful miles today. We’ve been stuck on this same ding dang highway for days now, this busy, noisy, crowded highway that never has a shoulder when it’s anywhere near a town and has overall been spectacularly unscenic. We had a lovely couple of hours on deserted roads, passing though what I’d guess were tree farms, based on the uniform size of all the firs. What an amazing, refreshing change.
We passed another smashed armadillo once we got back on 90, and another cat (which, maybe I shouldn’t find those more upsetting than any other animal, but I do). We also rode by several more of the crosses memorializing the fatal accidents that have happened along that route. We pass by a dozen of those things every day, it seems. I don’t know which is the more disbursing between the crosses, the roadkill, or the almost constant piles of debris along the shoulder from all the crashes. How is it that the people driving these same roads cling to the bogus idea that their own driving is somehow magically infallible? How do you even come up with an idea like that?
With very few exceptions, we’ve built an entire society around the idea of every person owning and operating a car—and nobody stops even to consider for a moment how fucking weird that is. We take it for granted. All of us. Including me. Cars are useful, of course, but what an odd foundation for a culture. Everything we build and every place we built it is made with that principle taken as a given. And it gets us around. It’s convenient as hell. But it also gets us the strip mall strips and the entitled, pissed of drivers and the roadkill and crosses and accident debris. It gets us a terribly ugly country, continually obscuring the natural beauty of the land, as well as that of the people inhabiting it.
In short, it gets us Pensacola, Florida.
Day 10: 18 Jan, 59.4 miles today, 557.9 total, Dauphin Island, AL
Really good day today. Well, that is, after finally getting clear of the bumper to bumper high-speed clusterfuck that is Pensacola. We had generally flat terrain—not counting a couple of bridges with super steep climbs—so we made fantastic time along the Gulf Coast as we passed finally out of Florida and into Alabama. One state down out of eight (a silly milestone, as it’ll take us three days to get through the next two states and then eventually we’ll spend a month riding through Texas, but it’s a milestone nonetheless).
We’re hitting the sort of groove any thru-hiker would recognize: it’s begun to feel normal to think of every day in terms of mileage, and to break down those miles into manageable sections divided by breaks for food. It’s also begun to feel normal to be in pain most of the time—nothing truly terrible, but my knees and thighs ache constantly and my hands feel like meatloaf at the end of the day. Every morning I get a sharp knot in my upper back that makes it excruciating to look over my shoulder, and it takes a couple hours of riding before it loosens up enough to sink below the top of my consciousness. Sean Meadow’s lower back is in a similar state. I wonder if we were 15 years younger if we’d even notice a gentle pang after 500 miles. As it is, we’ve both resorted to taking daily doses of vitamin I every morning (hiker speak for ibuprofen).
But anyway. Today was sunny. Today was warm. Today was flat. Today was fast. Today was mostly not spent surrounded by cars. Today was actually fun.
We even stopped at a little ocean-front fish shack for lunch, before riding the last mile and a half to the ferry. We ended up camping beneath the stilted house of a family from Warm Showers who aren’t here, but invited us to stay underneath them, anyway. It’s honestly kind of a weird vibe, camping-wise, but it’s right on the beach, and tonight’s gulf coast sunset was nothing short of spectacular. Worth a few awkward glances from the neighbors, to be sure.
Day 11: 19 Jan, 64.0 miles today, 621.9 total, Ocean Springs, MS
Such a lovely morning, the sun rising full, gentle, and warm on Dauphin Island as we packed up in the perplexingly warm breeze and headed to the bakery on the way out to the mainland. I didn’t even know that pecan cinnamon rolls were a real thing, but then I couldn’t stop myself from ordering a giant one along with my coffee, even though I’d already eaten an energy-bar breakfast. Truth be told, we’d only gone to the bakery to use the bathroom, as the only toilet to which we’d had access at the house we’d slept under was a portable potty neither of us wanted to figure out how to use, let alone clean. Once there, however, the high schoolers staffing the register were ringing up my order before I’d had time to process what on earth I’d just committed myself to.
It was worth it.
The morning ride was lovely. Climbing up the high bridge to the north of the island, we were high enough up that when I saw a flock of pelicans flying by us I had to look down at them. We rode right next to the sandy shores of Mobile Bay, eventually turning off to navigate (mostly) the kind of empty back-country roads I usually prefer. All was well until the route reunited us with our justifiably despised nemesis, US Hwy 90.
Maybe the Alabamian civil engineer responsible for that stretch of road never enjoy a peaceful night of sleep again as long as they live. Who in the fuck would ever think it was smart to put rumble strips in the middle of the shoulder? What good are they doing all the way over there? You’re already literally off the fucking road by the time you hit them. Rumble strips are, by design, obnoxious to drive over with a car; they are impossible to ride over with a bicycle. When some dick tries to get clever with them, it severely limits your options for a bikeable pathway to a narrow, irregular strip that sometimes hews the clumpy grass-lined ravine beyond the road and sometimes hews the heavily-trafficked road itself. This idiocy was what we were navigating when we were hit but a sudden, violent, unexpected downpour.
There still exist people in this country who believe that cyclists are on the whole too wimpy for more thrill-seeking hobbies like ATV riding or clubbing alligators or whatever. I know they exist, because every so often one of them will pass me while I’m riding a bike and yell the word “pussy!” out the window. I would cheerfully invite any of these daredevils, secure in their speeding iron safety-boxes, to thread the line in a sudden January rainstorm between some spitefully-placed rumble strips and a convoy of semis kicking up a blinding spray as they barrel down US Hwy 90 and pass within inches of your breakable human body, all while keeping a level enough head to keep dodging the debris scattered along your path.
We got lucky. The rain hit within a half-mile of the Mississippi border, and we were able to pull off the road and take shelter in the entranceway to a long-abandoned bar that some much-faded paint suggested had once been called The Borderline. We waited out the worst of it while eating snacks and complaining about most everything that had happened since US Hwy 90 had reentered our lives and trying to work up the motivation to get back in the road and start dealing with it again. That last part took a bit longer than I’d like to admit, but almost immediately the rumble strips had shifted to the white line separating the shoulder from the road—where, you know, it only makes sense for them to be—and by the time we were a quarter mile into the state of Mississippi, the shoulder opened up wide as any of the lanes for the cars, but all for us. It was truly amazing.
It also came in clutch as we came into the town of Pascagoula (the birthplace of Jimmy Buffet, according to a sign we passed on the way in) and the traffic got thick. The wide, wide shoulder came in handy again as we left that town on a bridge with 8 busy lanes of assorted cars and trucks, climbing well above whatever heights the Dauphin Island had achieve earlier in the day. Something really disconcerting about bridges like this is that they almost never have any sort of fence or guard along the side other than the k-rails that come up to about a cyclist’s butt, meaning that as you ride your open two-wheeled machine along these spans, you’re actually sitting above the only thing in place to prevent you from tumbling over a drop several hundred feet to the channel below.
The wide shoulder was also a nice touch while we were riding along the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial Causeway and got hit by another violent downpour. I won’t say that it was pleasant, but this time were far enough removed from the traffic that we felt totally safe still riding, even as the world a hundred feet away from us was obliterated in the rain and the spray.
We’d finally come from the swamps of Florida to bayou country, some of the wettest, most humid, and rainiest land in America—so if we got soaked on the way in, I suppose it’s only fitting. We even saw one of those wacky fan-boat things are we were riding over the causeway. The only thing missing for a truly proper bayou welcome was a gator sighting, but I suppose that even a muggy 62° in January is still a bit too cold for that.
Day 12: 20 Jan, 40.0 miles today, 661.9 miles total, Bay St. Louis, MS
I was a late convert to so-called “clipless” pedals, preferring to stick with old-fashioned toe clips on my bicycles for the better part of two decades. I didn’t like the fact that I would need special shoes for riding, as for years the bike was my primary mode of transportation and it seemed ludicrous to carry a whole other pair with me, not to mention needlessly expensive. I was unconvinced of the advantages touted by the hard-liners, and to be honest, it’s pretty reasonable for a person whose main goal with a bike is just getting around town not to give much of a shit just how efficient his pedal stroke might be. And, like everyone else inexperienced in biking with cleated shoes, I was afraid I would fall over, unable to free my foot in time to catch myself if ever I found myself off balance. Now that I ridden 1,000+ miles with clipless pedals, I can say that this last concern is rare. It never once in all those miles happened to me before today.
This was actually the second time I’d fallen off the bike I’d purchased specifically for this trip: the first was during a training ride, when I tried to make a gentle turn while flying fast on a surface I realized too late was wet and incredibly slick. My tires slid out from under me, and I hit the ground almost before I realized what was happening. I learned then that clipless pedals actually release when put under the stress of a crash, as my feet popped out the instant I slammed against the deck and I slid in one direction while my bike slid in another.
Today was also a wet one—wetter than the day I ate shit training. Sean Meadow and I woke up with the forecasted morning downpours pelting the tent. It was hard to find the drive to leave our cozy sleeping bags and intentionally go out into the wet, and in the end we managed to procrastinate just long enough that the rain had all but stopped by the time we had everything packed up. It seemed like a good sign, and we made fairly good progress before hitting Biloxi, which was where the day kinda went to shit.
We got hit by another downpour, which was cold and awful and unpleasant; but we were dressed for it, and were on a path that kept us apart from the endless streams of cars flying past on the highway. That squall brought with it a nasty wind that stole our forward momentum as it chilled us to the bone. We stopped at a beachside public bathroom, built to stay above the water in any event (and which featured a placard set at the roughly 20’ height the storm surge had reached during Hurricane Katrina in 2005), where we added layers and talked over how far we thought we ought to go the rest of the day.
It would have been a miserable and slow day in any case, is what I’m saying—by the time we crossed the Bay St. Louis Bridge, we had such a strong crosswind it was all but impossible to keep our bikes upright the long, long way across. But what really made the whole thing drag out pointlessly and constantly and frustratingly and maddeningly was the comically terrible shape the bike/pedestrian path was in. Even when we weren’t fighting the weather, we could only ride for a few minutes at a time before having to dismount and navigate some broken (or outright missing) piece of concrete or cordoned off sinkhole. It had looked like such a promising route, but it proved in practice to be nothing but a 27-mile pain in the ass.
And that’s how I had my second accident on this bike: while trying to ride a narrow and thoroughly ruined section of the pathway, my front tire veered off into the sand, where it immediately sunk. I was stuck, off balance, and still clipped in, every novice rider’s nightmare scenario. And though I tried, I couldn’t get my foot free in time to catch myself, and I fell over, standing still, still attached to my bike. At least the broken concrete pathway was there to break my fall.
Our plan had been to get as far as the row of hotels in the town of Bay St. Louis and reassess, but we didn’t bother. We were cold and worn out, and checked into the cheapest place we could find. The water in this Motel 6 is brown and it smells funny—which could be nothing more than a side effect of being in bayou country—but the room itself is dry and warm. It sets us up for a longer day tomorrow than we’d planned, but I’m not going to complain too much if I get to start the day off with dry feet.
Day 13: 21 Jan, 59.6 miles today, 721.5 miles total, New Orleans, LA
Oh my sweet fucking lord, today was the worst day of riding so far—and I hope to god of the whole trip. I don’t how many days like this it would take to break me, but there’s definitely a finite number. Being out here is a choice we’re making, every day. If this becomes what it like with any consistency, I will choose to do just about anything else. But at least my feet were dry, I guess.
The morning started off about as we figured it would: it was cold, it was windy, it was wet. But we were dressed for it and mentally prepared for a day of crummy conditions. We made decent progress out of Bay St. Louis and quickly were in the middle of nowhere. After a brief stop at the laundry hut of an RV park to warm up for a few minutes and illicitly use the bathroom despite the numerous signs explicitly saying that they were not for us, we continued on, shortly crossing the Pearl River into Louisiana.
Mississippi, surprisingly, had had excellent roads for biking (notwithstanding that POS pathway through Biloxi), and we’d gotten spoiled by shoulders that were reliably wide, smooth, flat, and clean. The change as we rode over the bridge was immediate: from the deep black, freshly asphalted roads of MS, the transition to the littered, faded-tan roads of LA was stark. These were highways that looked as it they hadn’t been maintained since the 80s, and though that vintage look did somewhat appeal to me, it made for a much tougher riding surface.
The uptick in the amount and diversity of roadkill was as sudden. We passed our first dog, a coonhound, maybe, or some sort of beagle—that was a real heartbreaker. We also rode by the recent carcasses of a bobcat and a massive 250lb boar, not to mention the scads of frog bodies littered along the roadside. I don’t know what’s going on in LA to cause this seemingly disproportionate increase in smashed wildlife, but I suspect it’s related to the literal piles of garbage lining the roads, usually clustered around signs reading “NO DUMPING.”
And this was where I got my first flat tire of the trip. Fixing a flat on the roadside is pretty much always an irritating process—nothing is clean, there’s nowhere good to sit down and work, etc.—but it gets worse when it’s cold. Everything is much less pliable, from the tire to your hands, and the twin processes of removing the tire from the rim and putting it back become less what’d you’d describe as “frustrating” and more “fucking maddening.”
Fixing a flat in the field is also hard to get right under more idyllic circumstances, as it requires finding the cause and removing it, and frequently the thing that actually punctured the tube is tiny, imbedded in the tire, and very, very hard to see. I spent the better part of an hour wrestling the tire off and back onto the rim, locating and removing the cause—a piece of wire stuck into the tread—and opting to use my spare tube while planning to patch the old one later. The problem, as often happens, was that I hadn’t actually found the thing that had caused the flat.
Less than an hour later, I was back on the roadside, substantially more irritated, trying once again to make my numb hands pull the tire bead over the wheel. We were still very much in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the entire stretch from Bay St. Louis to the industrial park just east of New Orleans (where we passed a Folgers coffee plant I at fist mistook as an oil refinery) seemed eerily abandoned. I’d never seen so much uninhabited space so near a major city before, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this area had been much more active prior to Hurricane Katrina. Maybe it had just never bounced back after the people who lived and worked there had lost everything; or maybe it was just January.
In any case, there was no warm place for me to go work on my stupid flat, no bike shop to call, or even decent shelter from the wind. I managed to find a stack of cinder blocks I could sit on as I meticulously looked for the source of my troubles. This time I found a tiny, thin piece of brown glass—a fragment from a beer bottle, maybe half the size of an uncooked grain of sushi rice. With no more spares in reserve, I had to use a patch. Not a huge difficulty, except that the cold prevented the cement from curing properly, so it was still fairly wet by time I lost patience with waiting in the freezing wind and began the agony of fitting the tire back over the rim.
The undried glue had clearly spread by the time I had everything back together and tire once again inflated, because the tire wasn’t seated quite right and was distinctly misshapen. There was now a sort of hiccup as the wheel rolled over the ground, but the patch was holding, so I didn’t really care. I assumed the weren’t cement would sort of work itself out as I rode. All I cared about was finally getting to New Orleans.
The route we’re using was created by Adventure Cycling, whose website grandly proclaims “The Adventure Cycling Route Network features rural and low-traffic bicycling routes through some of the most scenic and historically significant terrain in North America.” Ok, I grant you, the term “low-traffic” is extremely subjective. I’m sure many of the roads we’ve taken so far would be considered as such to a native of Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Beijing. What the guide doesn’t make any effort whatsoever to explain to you is that the routes are written to be followed in one direction and one direction only. And so while it is possible to bike the Southern Tier from East to West, as we are, doing so (it turns out) requires a fair amount of improvisation with no information.
What this meant in terms of getting into New Orleans was that as we approached the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, our instructions were to go the wrong way on an off-ramp in order to the get onto the Paris Road Bridge. We rode up an overpass until we had a good view of the bridge and discussed our options. From what we would see, the southbound side had a nice wide shoulder all the way up, so we decided to ride with the flow of traffic. What we didn’t know what there was a pedestrian walkway on the northbound side, which was the what the route had intended us to use without explanation. The southbound side had no such walkway, and as we learned, the shoulder came to abrupt end about a third of the way across.
We couldn’t ride. There just wasn’t room. We could have ride back down the garbage-strewn shoulder, but at that point we still didn’t know about the walkway, and we thought this was the only way we had to cross. We dismounted perilously close to the traffic and then proceeded to walk out bikes the three-quarters of a mile to the other side.
I’ve heard accounts of soldiers in battle, storming entrenched positions, having to push forward through an endless rain of mortar shells, convinced every time that the next one would hit them. I know how overwrought this comparison sounds, but it’s the only things that describes that experience. We were tucked over as far as we could manage, awkwardly maneuvering our bikes along a sort of curb as we stepped over all the debris on the roadside, while the whipping wind from cars and and jeeps pickups and semis and dump trucks screaming by inches away at 70mph kept us off balance. Both of us were absolutely convinced we’d be hit before made it to the safety of the open ground below. Certain as we were that we were about to be mangled or killed, the only way out at this point was to keep walking, to keep walking, to keep walking—once we’d dismounted, really, the only way out of the beast’s belly was to stay in. We could only go forward.
The thing that makes our experience different from the soldiers’ was that our walk through this nightmare lasted only 15 endless minutes. I can’t imagine what it would take to endure something like that for days, or weeks, or months. I suppose I’m grateful I never had to.
When we finally cleared the bridge, we stopped for a moment to catch our breath. Sean Meadow started retching, and I’m honestly surprised she didn’t throw up. I wouldn’t have blamed her. That shit was as fucking terrifying as it ultimately had been fucking pointless. What a dumb way that would have been to die. After a minute, we got back on our bikes and rode on.
We stopped at Wendy’s a half hour later, the first place we’d come to since the RV park’s laundry center where we could actually be indoors and out of the cold for a little bit. Our first meal in NOLA was at a fast food chain, but whatever. We got to be warm. We got to sit down. We got to decompress, just for a moment.
As we left, a car came around the parking lot and I had to stop to let it go. It was a simple, commonplace maneuver, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get my shoe out of my pedal, so I fell over onto the asphalt. It was there, on the ground, banged up and still clipped into my bike, that I finally lost it, yelling pointless obscenities at the slowly darkening gray sky. What a bullshit day this was. The last 8 miles would be easy and flat and something even I might describe as “low-traffic.” There would be hot showers and hot gumbo in the near future, and I would go to bed full of good food and questionable booze. But I didn’t know or care about any of that as I lay on that Wendy’s parking lot. I just let defeat wash over me for a handful of breaths, fully aware that I was making a scene, but unable to do anything except give into it. Then it passed. I stood up, brushed myself off, and we rode on into to New Orleans.
Day 14: 22 Jan, 0.0 miles today, 721.5 miles total, New Orleans, LA
Obviously, it’s preferable to avoid splashing any urine on oneself if it can be helped, but it honestly doesn’t feel like that big a deal when it’s happening in a private toilet because then it’s just your own pee. When it happens at a public toilet, it becomes all the more disturbing because your own private pee has been tainted by the indescribable filth of others. And for whatever reason, this feeling is compounded all the more when using a public trough.
This is why I prefer to pee outdoors, whenever possible.
Anyway, this was the first zero day of the trip. The idea had been to spend the day as tourists while knocking out any bike related errands we had to get done. We had gone out the night before, but had been so worn out by the day’s ride that we were full of food and drink and in bed by 2130hrs. At least we had an excuse. That wouldn’t be true for today.
We dropped my bike off at a local shop for a tubeless conversion, and then wandered out in search of beignets and coffee. We checked out a couple of other bike shops in the French Quarter, then ducked into a bar around the corner on Bourbon St ostensibly to get a drink, but mostly to use the bathroom (see concerns noted about public troughs above). Bourbon St is not where you go for a drink; it’s where you go to get fucked up on everclear and sugar. We tried not to order fuck-me-up drinks, but we failed, and were both buzzed after one apiece. I should have seen it coming when a fly landed in my drink and almost immediately died, I assume, from alcohol poisoning. By the time we’d gotten some chicken (and a booze slushy) and been chatted up by a friendly couple who initiated the conversation by asking us if there was a white people convention in town and left in desperate search of a bathroom, we were in pretty rough shape.
By that time, my bike was ready, though the guy in the shop mentioned that the rear tire was also in fairly rough shape. “Rear tire has a bunch of little cuts and most of them sealed. One I put a plug into. We will see how well it does.” I guess we will. We headed back to our air bnb to drop off the bike and recharge for dinner…but we never made it back out. Those drinks had really done a number on us.
At least the chicken was good.
