Day 15: 23 Jan, 47.8 miles today, 769.3 miles total, Reserve, LA
So tired, and we didn’t even do 50 today. I feel like this is the curse of zero days: the first day back out is always the hardest.
We made it out of New Orleans—not that it was ever really in doubt, though it feel kinda touch-and-go when Sean Meadow asked this morning to sleep a while longer after having slept for 12 straight hours already. Neither of us was feeling our best, but today’s riding was actually pretty nice. We followed the Mississippi all day. From what I can tell, there is a 30’ high, man-made (and concrete reinforced) embankment that I assume was built to keep the river from flooding the communities that live alongside it during bad weather. Awfully nice that someone at some point thought to put a bike path on top of it.
Once we left the outer NOLA suburbs we hit a super duper industrial area, the centerpiece of which was the gargantuan Valero oil refinery. It’s the size of a small city, this intricate maze of pipes, tanks, and chimneys on one side with a huge line of tanker ships moored on the other. Industrial works on this scale fascinate me. They’re the collaborative work of thousands and thousands of people to design, build, run, and maintain, but they’re largely kept out of the way. You could live your entire life a few miles away and never even know that it’s there. And while I believe as strongly as the next bicycling hippie nerd in the immediate need to dismantle the oil economy, we’ll, we haven’t done that yet, so places like this remain vital. And weirdly compelling to dorks like me interested in infrastructure.
Part of it has something to do with how alien this constructed landscapes are, like a warren from another planet or the incomprehensible interior of an extraterrestrial space ship. But what was even weirder was when we were abruptly routed across an area described in local signage as a “spillway,” but which was basically a huge, flat, empty flood plane, surrounded by plants and refineries in the distance on every side but the south, where it protected from the Mississippi by a long wall, something like a dam. No buildings and almost no traffic. It was a weird shift into a literal nowhere.
Coming out of that zone and back into semi-rural habitation, we started a seeing the wreckage of abandonment strewn all along the path—reminiscent of the lonely spaces we’d encountered on the always into New Orleans. There were sprawling heaps of debris on the river side of the embankment, and gutted empty buildings and trailer parks on the sheltered side. Am I naïve in thinking this is all Katrina related? That storm was truly devastating, but it was also over 16 years ago. I’d have thought that buildings ruined by flood and left to the elements for a decade and a half would have long since deteriorated into rubble. Or is something else at work here that I’m not seeing? It gives the area an eerie, sinister vibe, like the images of Pripyat in the years after the accident at Chernobyl. What does it do to a person to live amid such devastation and decay? Why do we always give up on people when the job of helping them recover has only ever barely begun?
Day 16: 24 Jan, 69.4 miles today, 838.7 miles total, Baton Rouge, LA
Last night was rough. Grateful as we were to pitch out tent behind the Reserve firehouse, their floodlights gave the impression that we camped in the center of an arena with all the floods blazing. Pulling my buff over my eyes like a blindfold helped, but did nothing to dampen the sounds of the freight trains that passed every so often on the tracks a couple hundred feet away. It was even the sound of the engines or the cars jostling on by, it was the stream of earth-shattering blasts of those world-ending horns like some injured giant wailing in agony. I could feel it vibrating through my air pad.
Still, the morning wasn’t bad, if a bit cold. We stopped at a café/gas station which very obviously catered primarily to the employees of the refinery across the street. Food was low-quality diner fare, which was honestly kind of perfect. I got a full breakfast and a huge coffee for like $6, plus a warm place to poop and clean up a little bit. While we were there we met a guy who was trying to walk 5,000 miles around America in a calendar year. He started in Boston in September and was already well into Louisiana. He was pushing a baby carriage, which seemed pretty clever—though he said he’d had problems with the cops, as people kept thinking he was putting a child in danger by walking along these same roads Sean Meadow and I have been biking.
I was so thrown by walking out of the bathroom and seeing another well-meaning transient dirtbag (also the only other person properly wearing a mask, incidentally) that I didn’t end up contributing much to the conversation. He was the first we’ve seen this entire time. On a thru-hike, we would be seeing people like him and us all the time, but we’ve constantly been the odd ones out. It was kind of a relief to be recognized in that way. I really do hope the best for that guy.
We had to get going if we wanted to beat the rain to Baton Rouge, however, so we parted ways after only a brief chat. We should have hung out for a while. We very much did not beat the rain anywhere, not even the poorly stocked convenience store I was so determined to reach before the rain could start falling in earnest that I blew right past a couple of signs marking the detour for the route we were planning to take. It wasn’t until we left the the Stop N Go that we noticed the bridge ahead was out and we had to backtrack to get around it.
A friend warned us before we started this journey “Biking is less like hiking than you’d think. You can’t eat like you’re on a thru-hike.” And honestly, that makes sense. You have an obvious mechanical advantage on a bike that you don’t when you’re moving by foot, and you can coast a fair amount of the time. And yet, you’re still hungry much of the time, and the abundance of calories (if not exactly good food) makes it really dang hard not to eat like a thru-hiker. Today at that shitty freaking Stop N Go, all I wanted was something hot, but I ended up walking out of there with a can of sour cream and cheddar Pringle’s and two oatmeal crème pies, all of which I ate in the parking lot. Oh well, I guess. We’re not hiking, true, but we busted ass to get to that dumb store and I was famished by the time we did it.
Then we had to finish out the day in the rain. I’m just tired of it. Tired of the bleak gray skies and tired of being wet. Tired of getting sprayed by cars and trucks and tired of the massive racket they all make as they pass. And I’m tired of all the dirt and grime that covers our bikes and our gear and our selves whenever we have to ride in this weather.
After plans A through D fell through today, we ended up riding to the Econo Lodge in Baton Rouge. The receptionist (who I assume was also the franchise owner) was a giant wiener about us taking our bikes into the room and made a big fuss about not scuffing “his” walls—and this after he attempted to overcharge Sean Meadow, who then just booked the room in front of him using a third-party app. I’d already wiped most of the mud and dirt from the frames by the time Sean Meadow had checked in and come back out to report how anal this dude was being about letting us into the damn building. Then he followed her out and tried to tell us to store our bikes outside in a fenced storage area. I just glared at him. Sean Meadow said, “no, we’re not doing that.” And we walked by time, tracking water and, yeah, some onto his cleanish tile hallway floor. But the room itself remains undamaged by our horrid, horrid bikes. Whatever. At least we’re all staying safe and dry tonight.
Day 17: 25 Jan, 53.2 miles today, 891.9 miles total, Morganza, LA
I don’t have the energy or the words to describe how tired I am of riding in the wind and the rain. Maybe if I hadn’t spent 6 years of my life living in Seattle getting pistol whipped by riding my bike in this sort of weather 9 months of the year I would be able to withstand more than a week of it at a time without reaching my mental breaking point, but alas. Yesterday was exhausting, and we’d planned a relatively shorter day in part to make up for it. But it wasn’t a short day. Despite waiting until almost 10 to leave the Econolodge so we could hit up a bike shop on the way out of town, we should have been able to cover today’s miles well before we started losing daylight, but, again, alas.
Substantially not helping us make good time today was the fact that we had our third flat tire of the tire of the trip (and the third we’ve had in LA, no less). This was Sean Meadow’s first, and it turned out to be a pretty easy patch even with her ancient, desiccated patch kit and even though I broke one of her tire levers while trying to help her get the tire off the rim. She did get with her first patch, though, and we were on our way a great deal faster than we’d been with either of mine. The sun even came out while we were working on it. It felt like a great omen at the moment, but by the time we’d made it the ten miles to our next rest stop the clouds had rolled back in and stayed with us all the way to the bitter end.
We had an uneventful crossing of the Mississippi, after having followed its course since leaving New Orleans. I’m hopeful that getting away from that channel of industrial commerce and away from that flood plane will get us into some more promising terrain. Everything in Louisiana outside of NOLA has been, um, bleak, to put it gently. Following the specifically-named “Scenic Highway” out of Baton Rouge today, the only scenery of note were a handful of oil refineries and a scattering of more abandoned and slowly rotting neighborhoods. I guess it’s technically not not scenic, but were I in charge of tourism in that part of the state, I might not encourage visitors to linger. The smell of these refineries alone is something that I can only assume takes some work to get used to.
Day 18: 26 Jan, 60.7 miles today, 952.6 miles total, Bunkie, LA
I woke up early and cold and crawled out of our tent at the Morganza RV park, just to sit in the heated laundry room munching on half-smashed Cheez-Its, where at least it was warm. When I headed back out after awhile, Sean Meadow was up and a little steamed. She’d left a fair but critical review in light of our treatment at the hands of the receptionist/franchise owner/douche at the Baton Rouge Econolodge, and he’d publicly responding by calling her a “fake guest.” Looking over the reviews of that location in google, he’s done that every single time he’s gotten less than stellar feedback. It’s a surprisingly transparent ruse; I wonder if he thinks he’s actually being clever.
The sun rose as we got ready and it almost felt warm by the time we left, but then we came round a bend and met the headwind we’d be riding against for half the day. It’s amazing how much a stiff wind will slow you down while it wears you out. By the time we hit the day’s first significant obstacle I was already kind of tired.
We came to a bridge on LA Hwy 1 with: no shoulder whatsoever—which has actually been the very unfortunate standard in Louisiana—but also train tracks running along the west side of the bridge, and a weird narrow corridor on the east for some kind of huge mechanical hoist on rails. We opted to ride the weird narrow corridor, which would have proven 100% disastrous if the hoist rail thing had at any point come into service, but we had’t seen anyone around to operate it, so it felt like the safer option than riding that mile with cars. Even so, it was a stressful ten minutes across.
Shortly afterwards we were finally reunited with those lovely, lonely, almost completely empty country roads—we hadn’t seen one since at least Mississippi, or maybe even Alabama or Florida. Louisiana, of course, has its own flavor: whereas in other stretches of country we might have had maybe two dog encounters along the way, today we well over a dozen. For a long time it felt like we’d barely fallen back into a cycling cadence before we had to stop riding and shoo away yet another pack of overeager yard dogs. A lot of them seemed to just want to be friends, and in a way those were the worst, because they would follow the longest, and hang out in the street while pickups and cars roared by, and it just felt so hard and mean to see some happy tail-wagging pup bound up to you and have be a hard ass and sternly leave it behind when all you want to is play with it and give it a good scratchin’.
The angriest dogs were the little runts that honestly we could have easily outrun except for the fact that they always riled up all the bigger dogs they lived with, and those we had to stop and deal with before we could ride on. But even after the big dogs had finally lost internet and started back home, the little fuckers would still be yipping at us like mad.
We made it to Bunkie with a fair amount of daylight to spare, as we didn’t really find a single place to rest today for any length of time. We were taken in by the local firehouse, the chief of which makes a point of being welcoming to cyclists. The only guy in duty tonight is a local boy (born in the next town over) with a perfectly charming Louisiana accent. He’s oddly the first person I’ve heard with one in this state.
Day 19: 27 Jan, 71.7 miles today, 1,024.3 miles total, Oberlin, LA
We hadn’t been warned at any time beforehand that the firefighters of Bunkie would meet in the room where we were sleeping to being their day at 0700hrs sharp, so it was a bit disorienting to be roused as a half dozen uniformed dudes suddenly came into the room and started punching in at a time clock on the near wall of an adjacent office. I wasn’t wearing pants.
They were nice enough about it and offered us cups of the coffee they started brewing the kitchen while we packed up. Hot coffee was huge boon on day like today, which dawned clear and bright but nonetheless really freaking cold. Poor Sean Meadow once again couldn’t find a cup of hot chocolate to save her life.
Out of Bunkie, we had a good stretch of empty country roads almost entirely to ourselves—with only one quickly dealt-with dog run-in to speak of. That ended when we made the turn that was supposed to shepherd us through Chicot State Park. There was a big, lit-up sign telling us the route was closed, but the only alternative we could see was a super busy two-laner in bad condition, so we decided to take our chances and try get through on the closed road.
We only made it a couple of miles before we came to a pretty substantial barricade behind which an RV had been parked. A large, imposing man—who was so clearly ready for us I assume he had been alerted that we were on our way by someone in one of the houses we passed just beyond the “route closed” sign—was walked away from the RV and straight down the middle of the road, shaking his head. He told us the route was closed, but we could still get into the park if we went back to the super busy two-laner and took it for another mile. I wouldn’t say I exactly trusted him, as his job was to protect the park from us, not to protect us from riding on a dangerous street, but at that point we really didn’t have much of a choice.
It wasn’t a mile on the super busy two-laner. Though his directions proved to be sincere, the distance from the turn was long enough for me to start to seriously doubt him. That road really did suck: the surface was in terrible shape, there was no shoulder whatsoever, and it was clogged with the sort of aggro dingleberries that need to make a big show of passing you in their oversized, modded-out pickups and sports cars. I really don’t understand these guys—given that literally everyone understands the psychological principles that are at work, if you’re really so ashamed of having a tiny penis, why would you do everything in your power to advertise that fact? You are screaming “I have a little dick and I feel bad about it” at the top of your metaphorical lungs every time you take your muscle auto out and drive it like an asshole, and every single other person in the road can hear you, bro. How does that make you feel better about it?
I’ve started singing a little song to myself every time one of these dudes passes way to close or honka honka honks at us. “Teeny peenie, teeny peenie, teeny peenie,” I sing. It’s catchy, and it honestly makes it hard to stay irritated for very long.
We spend the afternoon riding past bayou after bayou. We ended up in this massive expanse of farmland: combination rice paddies/crawfish farms as far as the eye could see in every direction. I’d never seen anything quite like it before. No dogs. Almost no people. Just the occasional boat left aground at the edges of one of these fields and what looked like crawfish traps set in long rows.
We got to Oberlin just as our host at the Allen Parish Tourist Commission was pulling up. We’d be sleeping on the tourist center’s front porch, but she wanted to give us the rundown before we settled in. She let us use the bathroom first, but by the time I was done peeing she was already deep into storytelling mode with Sean Meadow and I had a hard time keeping up. We might have given some slight offense when we’d mentioned that we’d mostly been living on ramen and packaged oatmeal and hadn’t had much in the way of local food since leaving New Orleans. “That’s CREOLE,” she said, “this here is CAJUN country.” Which, ok, fair enough. I ended up walking a mile across town to a place called The Crawfish Shack that she’d recommended, only to discover once there that crawfish weren’t in season in January, so I had to rely on the waitress’s recommendation. Still, the po boys I ended up carrying back under my puffy all the way to the tourist center were worth the effort.
Day 20: 28 Jan, 56.6 miles today, 1,080.9 miles total, Merryville, LA
I was in the process of making peace with the state of the bathroom behind the Allen Parish Tourist Commission—which I’d been expecting to be rough ever since our host had specifically disavowed any responsibility for its cleanliness—when one of my water bottles fell mouthpiece-down onto the floor in front of the toilet. I felt much less inclined to be okay with the situation while furiously scrubbing it in my sink, but honestly it really was a great kindness to have had access to it, whatever condition it was in.
Today was sunny, warm, clear, beautiful, and fucking brutal. We had a headwind almost all day, so even though we were never planning to go incredibly far, we were nonetheless spent before we were even halfway done. It was a shame, as the road we were on had a wide, clean shoulder and the hills we rode over were gentle and would actually have been a lot of fun if the wind hadn’t been intense enough that we had to put work into going down them, to say nothing of how much work it was to go back up.
That was the day, mile after mile, through the sudden conifer forests through which we’re passing now that we have unexpectedly left the bayou. We did pass briefly into a stretch of farmland, that was actively being crop-dusted. It was interesting to watch, but disconcerting to be able to smell whatever the hell the little prop planes were dumping on the fields—and that was even though we were upwind of them the entire time.
It was with immense relief that we arrived at the Merryville, LA Historical Museum, which has a frankly amazingly cozy little cabin toward the back of its property—where we’re allowed to stay. It’s electrified and the little space heater means that we’re going to be warm tonight, even if the wind picks up and shifts direction like it did last night. It’s always a bit of a rude awakening when frigid air suddenly starts blowing directly into your sleeping bag. Thank god that won’t be a worry tonight.
Day 21: 29 Jan, 64.4 miles today, 1,145.3 miles total, Kuntze, TX
It is becoming increasingly difficult to think of Adventure Cycling as anything other than a shadowy cabal of vengeful anti-cyclists who meet in dank and darkened conference rooms with the sole purpose of dreaming up ways to torture people on bikes. Each of them must surely have suffered some terrible wrong at the hands of a cyclist, because I cannot image anyone who themselves rides a bike intentionally create a route on which cyclists have to share a narrow and harrowingly busy, shoulder-free two-lane highway with a posted speed limit of 70 fucking mph with an endless stream of pickups, SUVs, cars, logging trucks, dump trucks, and one motorcyclist. Welcome to Texas, I suppose. If this is what riding on these roads is going to be like I’m glad the very first thing I did after entering this state was pee on it.
Anyway, after the giant flying fuck clearly given for their commitment to adhere to “rural and low-traffic routes” that that fucking road represented, Adventure Cycling really stuck the landing with 30+ miles on US Hwy 96, which only differs from the US interstates (which we were deliberately avoiding) because of all of the side roads and driveways with cars flying into and out from at high speed without notice. The posted speed limit is 75mph, the stream of cars across all four lanes is truly unceasing, and the endless roar of the traffic is deafening. Its only saving grace is the wide shoulder that runs along most of its length. But it is an unscenic and unpleasant ordeal; it’s nothing more than an obstacle to get through.
Making matters worse was the fact that the wind picked up about time we got on that road. We were now riding along a different heading than we were yesterday, but the wind had shifted course to match, so once again we were fighting a headwind most of the day. Which is fine, for a while, but eventually just becomes demoralizing.
So I was completely done in by the time we finally made it to Kountze, so much so that when we didn’t find anyone actually at the local fire station I just sorta numbly stood next to our bikes, stuffing chips into my face while Sean Meadow called around, trying to get ahold of someone with the authority to let us pitch our tent in their side-yard. Which she finally did. What a ding dang relief. I’m so glad this day is finally over. We’re in Texas for about a third of this entire trip—I really, really, really, really hope the rest of the state isn’t like this.
And to the driver of the built-up pickup truck who drove his vehicle onto the shoulder of US 96 at 75mph while leaning in his horn in an absurd attempt to terrorize us: you’re a fucking coward, bro. I can’t imagine what it is about people biking so far out the flow of traffic that not only were you not even inconvenienced by us but you had to literally go out of your way to try to fuck with us, but whatever it is, you couldn’t even man up enough to pull over and confront us about it directly. You don’t have the guts to do what we’re doing, you pathetic, spineless little wiener. We’re putting the work of own bodies into traveling across the country, exposed and unguarded while sharing roads with reckless idiots in screamingly fast personal tanks—something you wouldn’t be able to handle outside the protective steel womb of that rolling, gas-powered billboard for your micropenis. These asinine, mouth-breather shenanigans kill cyclists, you semiliterate redneck turd bucket: you’re not as skilled a driver as you think you are, and you haven’t done a fraction of what we have to earn our right to be here. You’re a contemptible, spoiled, overgrown child. You need to get the fuck off our road and grow the fuck up.
