Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

First things first: The recumbent was awesome!

I would not use any other style of bike for such a long trip. I never had to worry about saddle sores, or aching wrists, or a kink in my neck. My wind profile was nice and low, and my luggage capacity was high.

My decision to leave behind my tent was a good one, since there were almost no places to camp along the way. I suppose I could have asked strangers if I could camp in their yard or on their farmland, but as a lone traveler on a long haul with some expensive gear, I didn't feel comfortable enough. With two people sharing a tent the variables are different, I'm sure.

Other changes I would make: New gloves. My ski gloves didn't block moisture, and that was a problem. I also needed some kind of waterproof over-sock, so I didn't have to use plastic shopping bags. I used the bags even when it was dry out, to reduce windchill. I know there are waterproof covers for biking shoes, but I don't like them for three reasons: First, they'd get beat up whenever I walk around off the bike. Second, they all have a hole in the bottom to expose the pedal clip, and on this recumbent, the soles of my feet go vertical during each pedal stroke. After half an hour of cycling into a rainstorm, the liners would fill with water. And third, I can't find any in my size. Bah! So that's still an unsolved problem.

My water sack had a slow leak, so I couldn't use it for this trip. I kept all my water in metal canteens instead. They didn't seem to add much weight, and they could attach to the outsides of the bike. I never worried about dropping or puncturing them.

Toolkit:

The toolkit was great. I used the needle-nose pliers to remove thorns from my tires, pull my brake cables, cut zipties, loosen the valves on my tubes, and manipulate the wiring on my hub generator. I used the miniature wrench to adjust my headlamp, and attach and remove my rack, seat, tail light, and pedals. It would have been almost impossible to disassemble the bike without those.

The plastic tire levers saved me a lot of trouble. I used a bunch of the zipties, and almost all of the chain oil. I used the hex keys, of course. I had a swiss army knife, and I used the knife, bottle opener, screwdriver, scissors, and saw (to cut a hat brim to extend my helmet). I used the tire pump a dozen times - totally worth it. (A spare tire is useless if you can't get it inflated, right?) My set of folding scissors turned out to be completely frivolous. Those are out. I didn't use the electrical tape, but I'm strangely reluctant to discard it. To my relief I didn't need any of the spare parts (screws, washers, chain link, brake pads), or the tire repair kit, or my medical kit - but I'm keeping all those. I should probably add a chain tool, and a spare 20-inch tire to go with the tube.

Tech toys:

The laptop was very helpful in the evenings. It was powerful enough to deal with my photos, and the physical keyboard was great for my logs and correspondence. I researched my route on it from hotel rooms, with maps and weather reports and topography and restaurant menus all open in the web browser. The extra USB ports charged my gadgets at night. Doing all this stuff with a tablet - the iPad even - would have been much harder. It doesn't have the horsepower, and even with a detachable keyboard, there is basically no concept of "keyboard navigation", which would drive me bananas.

In fact, I should have left the iPad at home. The only time it was uniquely useful on the trip was when I wanted to look at a map, and AT&T didn't get a signal to my phone, but Verizon got a signal to the iPad. That's it. Sure it made a good conversation piece and it was fun to watch The Daily Show on it in restaurants, but that didn't make it worth the weight. Next time it's staying home.

I brought that Contour GPS camera along for the entire ride, but never turned it on once. It was just too easy to use the iPhone for taking video, and I knew that if I dug out the Contour I would have to wait at least 30 seconds for it to get a GPS lock. Then there would be the effort of importing, cropping, and transcoding the video... Next time I'll just leave that thing at home.

All my gadgets stayed dry, thanks to those waterproof "lok-saks", and an overabundance of sandwich bags. I could have used another dry-sack for dirty laundry, instead of just cramming it straight into the pannier.

The day began like the rest; I had most of my gear already packed up the previous night, so all I needed to do was throw on clothing, stuff the sleeping bag into a pannier, and shove the bicycle outside to the parking lot. After an entire month of this I've gotten pretty efficient!

The trip uptown was uneventful, though I had to pedal at 6 miles per hour the whole time because of the destroyed rim. The fellow at the rental station had my minivan ready in the parking lot. He showed me how to use the new-fangled electronic key, demonstrated the automatic doors, and helped me fold down the seats and load the bike inside. The stereo had a line-in jack, so my first stop was Wal-Mart to purchase a cable for wiring up my iPod. Then I hit the freeway! New York, here I come!

As I drove along, bellowing lyrics to They Might Be Giants and then listening to electronic boopy and beepy music, I thought about my trip:

Q: So how many miles did I ride?

A: Somewhere around 1300 miles, from Trinidad, CO to Toldeo, OH. That works out to 43 miles per day. For comparison, my original route to New York was 1800 miles, and to make it there in 30 days I would have needed to ride 60 miles per day.

Q: Was it everything I'd hoped for?

A: Well, I had a pile of different plans and ideas for the trip, but when I got on the road I became focused mostly on enjoying each day as its own thing. That was probably the best approach - the most important, at least. I didn't have any expectations about what I would find, but I had some personal goals: Relax, see new places, restore my health, and figure out what to do next. I think I met those goals.

Q: How did a bike trip work to restore my health?

A: Last year I developed a thyroid condition that pitched my metabolism into overdrive, burning my body down like a road flare. Then my thyroid swung hard in the other direction, and I gained a lot of weight, became very lethargic and depressed, and had huge difficulty concentrating at work.

The causes were both psychological and environmental, and to get healthy again I wanted to push everything off my calendar and do a lot of aerobic exercise outside in the fresh air. It was especially important that I stay away from my apartment, which had become a gas chamber of mold spores and dessicated rat crap. A long bike trip was a perfect activity, and it had the desired effect.

Q: Did it cost too much?

A: It certainly cost a lot. I planned a pretty loose budget, and I still went over it. A hundred bucks a day is serious money, especially when you're not working. And as much as I've fantasized about the idea of biking across the country while I do contract-based computer work on a laptop, the real world is not very accommodating for it. I need long chunks of quiet time to write code, and the daily costs of sitting in place - hotel, food, and camping fees - appear to outweigh the benefits of using that time to work.

Better to drop anchor and work some place cheap - like an actual apartment that you can rent for the equivalent of 15 bucks a day - and save up the vacation time for later.

Q: Is that the kind of life I aspire to? Work a while, then bike somewhere new?

A: When you've been working 60 hours a week for five years, the idea sounds grand. But this trip has taught me that I'm too interested in planting roots and building things to be a seasonal nomad. There are plenty of people who bike around the world perpetually. Some have written books about it. I'm not going to be one of those people.

Q: If I was going to do it again, what would I do differently?

A: I would set a much longer deadline. I would budget for 30 miles a day - like I knew I should have - instead of 50. I'd save up a bit more money. I'd leave three months earlier. I'd have more time to explore, talk to people, and write. Less of a backlog.

Q: How did my equipment fare? What would I keep; what would I change?

A: The answer to this is long and warrants its own post. :D

Q: If I did this again, would I do it alone, or with other people?

A: I have never gone on a trip like this with other people. If I wanted to do so, there are organizations - web communities - that I could use to find companions pretty easily. Since I have never done so, I must conclude that there is something in me that prefers to go it alone. I can think of a few reasons why: It's easier to plan and schedule a trip for one. I can go exactly as fast or slow as I want. I can listen to audiobooks for hours, since I don't have to keep my ears open all the time.

Of course if I had a companion I could substitute audiobooks for conversation... And I'm sure we could save a lot of money and carry less weight... Maybe I'll try it some time; who knows.

Q: What am I going to do next?

A: Enjoy the holidays, look for a better place to live, and get employed!

I arrived in Elmira after seven solid hours of driving. Erika's parents greeted me and gave me a tour of their impressive home, then Richard and I caravanned to the airport so I could drop off the rental car. Business concluded! A little while after that, we all drove to the airport in Binghamton and met Erika. Smiles and hugs and tears of joy ensued!

Holy Toledo!

Anybody want to buy an adorable little tractor?


Today I listened to lots of podcasts about technology, since my brain wasn't in a storytelling mood, and pedaled casually eastward with the wind blowing gently at my side. I saw plenty of evidence of the recent rains:


I also paused by the side of the road to eat lunch and observed a gang of chickens pecking around. Bok bok bok! So nice to see them outside enjoying themselves.


Today turned out to be my last day on the road, for a couple of reasons. The first one was my lack of time: I needed to get to New York in the next five days, and I still had more than 600 miles to go. The second reason was more immediate: The rutted streets of Toledo destroyed the front rim of my bicycle.


I made it to a Thai restaurant for some mediocre chow, but by then the rim was bent so far out of shape that it was sticking against the brake pads. To get to the motel I had to unhook the brake cable and bend the pads outward, otherwise the wheel would not turn at all. And after that, the wheel would stick even with the brake pads turned aside, unless I partially deflated the tire. Clearly the bike was in no shape for distance riding, and barely adequate just for getting around town. I had to find some alternative method of travel. I booked two nights at the motel, allowing myself a day to relax and explore my options, and then it was SPLAT onto the bed, with my sleeping bag wrapped around me.

I didn't sleep well. I wanted to book two days, but I was so far behind it was hard to justify. I decided to compromise by riding only 30 miles, dividing the distance between Bryan and Toledo. Toledo was a big enough city that I could probably find a rental car company that didn't charge something ridiculous.

Instead of leaping right onto the bike like usual, I sat around in the motel lobby catching up with my email and dumping out a lot of notes about the previous three days, which I hadn't had time to turn into journal entries. I'd forgotten how easily the computer distracts me. Whooosh! Three hours gone. I threw my geek equipment into the backpack and saddled up.

To save time, I decided to minimize my stops and just keep on' pedalin'. I started a new audiobook, the first in the "Pip and Flinx" series of classic sci-fi novels called "For Love Of Mother Not". It had a decent beginning, but then chapter 3 came along, and I was yanked out of the main narrative to get a steaming pile of expository dialogue from the villain, like a racehorse pulling up short to move its bowels halfway through the first lap of a race. "Whooaaaah, hold on, I gotta do this right now, sorry..." (Splaaaaaat)

Actually it would have been okay, but it was so clumsy. Most of the chapter was a collection of inner monologues, and they were so plot-ex-machina that they could have doubled as the voiceover for a movie trailer. "IN A WORLD WHERE SCIENCE AND MORALS COLLIDE... WE ARE A ROGUE BAND OF MISFITS... CHALLENGING THE EMPIRE..."

It was so execrable that I paused the book and pedaled in silence for a while, trying to decide if I should just cut my losses and delete the whole Pip and Flinx series from my iPod, never to return. "On the other hand, this book is so old, and it's written for such a young audience, that maybe these ugly, overexposed tropes are an accidental exception, and the rest of the book is still pretty good. After all, chapters 1 and 2 were decent, and the series is beloved by fans... Okay, I'll give it another chance."

So I continued, with chapter 4, and listened with a question suspended in my mind: What if chapter 3 had never happened? What if we didn't have the central mystery of the book and the main character rudely explained and spoiled only a few pages in, and were instead left to struggle with the mystery as Pip appeared, and then the kidnappers, and then the scientists and the agents? Putting it together from clues, with the narrator's perspective stuck entirely on Flinx? I went all the way to the end of the book with that question, and realized that with only minor editing, it would have gone from a mediocre book to an excellent book just by obliterating chapter 3.

Dammit!

But! I got this awesome photo of another state line:


By the time I rolled into Bryan, it was dark and cold. I ate a big meal in the restaurant adjacent to the motel, and booked two nights, so I could spend the next full day resting my legs and editing photographs. In the evening I felt like taking my brain off the hook with a big dose of pop culture, so I downloaded a heap of Weird Al videos, and swapped links to old songs with Erika on youtube, reminiscing about the 90's music scene and our evolving tastes and childhoods.

This video is awesome: CLICK IT, YO!

The price of digital content is being driven inexorably down, and I think that's a good thing. Even if it may cost tens of millions to make a feature film, the cost should go down because the method of delivery is being stripped of value. What is that method of delivery, if you include yourself in the equation? You sit in a room, looking at a screen, passively. You do not move, you do not create art, you do not give your opinions. You get no exercise, you get no interaction with another human. This should be cheap. This should be seen as cheap. A culture where this is made cheap will gravitate to participation and engagement.

The car rental place I spotted yesterday wanted 800 bucks for a one-way drive to New York. An insane price. "Oh well, I guess that's out," I said to myself, and rode eastward out of town.

The comedy and banjo-pickin' antics of Billy Connoly provided the morning soundtrack as I wound back and forth along the rain-slicked highway, enjoying the fresh air and the colorful procession of farmlands and homesteads. It was interesting to see the land in such heavy direct use, with equipment scattered around and piles of firewood, hay, fenceposts, bricks, dirt, engine parts... On most days I would see animals and people roving around them, but not today, with the sky brewing up a thunderstorm.

Check this barn out. I wonder which way the wind usually blows around here?


One of the stranger things I saw was a nondescript house with a gigantic wire cage built in the driveway. At the foot of the driveway stood a large sign on a pole, advertising "The Great Cats Of Indiana". I stopped the bike and stared for a while, and saw movement near the top of the cage. There was a black panther up there, glaring at me and pacing furiously back and forth in a tight figure-eight pattern. I could tell he was just itching to claw out of there and tackle my bicycling ass to the ground, and make a quick lunch out of my face.


Closer inspection of the sign showed that the land was a sanctuary, a rescue operation for large cats that had been smuggled illegally into the country by private citizens with shit for brains. Perhaps the money gained from exhibiting them compensated for the avalanche of meat they required - and the danger of keeping them alive.

I rode on, pensive. A mild rain began to fall around me, and I felt glad that I'd checked the weather report back in the hotel room and put on my raingear ahead of time. The fields were already wet from last night, and getting wetter.


In the afternoon I got a message from Erika:

"There is a line of severe thunderstorms coming your direction. Your area is also under a tornado watch."

Totally badass. Time for some weather.

I turned north for a while, working my way past another of those reeking factory farms bursting with psychotic chickens, then past a cheerful bunch of highway workers trimming a cantankerous tree over the side of the road. I raised my candy bar in greeting and a big dude in a jumpsuit and waved back with his gloved hand and a lot of teeth. The clouds got thicker and then appeared to run out of room on top of themselves and began piling under each other instead, creating a wall of mist blowing in from the west across the farmlands. Whatever was going to happen, it would happen soon, and in quantity.


I saw this totally awesome piece of hardware just as the rain grew stronger:


Five minutes later I turned west, and felt the wind once again at my back. I had just enough time to shut off the Billy Connoly (he was singing some inane pop song about not wanting his photograph taken) and switch to some lively piano music, and then the storm came down like a wall. I was hammered by fat raindrops. A puddle formed in the fold of my raincoat, above my stomach. The roadway became the surface of a lake.

"Whooo!" I said, to no one in particular.

Then I began to feel shotgun-blasts of hail, rebounding off my helmet. I could feel it pummeling my arms. I looked down and saw a mound of it growing in the puddle on my jacket, and swiped it off with one hand. The hailstones grew as large as cherry pits, many of them larger, and cratered and full of air bubbles like some kind of exotic candy. I chomped on a few and they were quite refreshing.

"HAH!" I said, at the weather.

The wind was still pushing at my back so I didn't have to pedal much to be carried along at the same speed. Since the rain was being blown just as fast, I got to see it writhe slowly around me on the pavement as the turbulence evolved. I drifted into a small town, stopping cautiously at the intersections to avoid the drivers that were half-blinded by their defrosting windshields. Thunder cracked and cascaded around in the sky above. Lightning struck in the forest to the north, but never got closer than a few miles.

This was awesome. I pedaled away in this happy situation for about half an hour, then the rain died down. The clouds un-stacked themselves, and opened up above me, though they never actually let the blue sky appear. The sonorous thunder lingered for another hour.

I stopped and made a recording of a bit of it, for your thunderfication:

11-14-11 3:18pm : Thunder

After a while the clouds tore themselves apart, just in time for the sun to start lighting them up from below.


I amused myself with a creepy BBC Radio 4 production called "The House At World's End", by Stephen Sheridan, then started the new Terry Pratchett novel, "Snuff". The sun went down. Ghostly deer bounded across the road, between forests. A few yappy dogs pursued me and I waved them away. I drifted into another small town, this one barely large enough to have a name, and wandered into the local eatery, a big square building divided into a warren of multi-purpose booths, counters, dividers, and storage rooms, plus one big table.


For two bucks you could get biscuits and gravy. For 35 bucks you could use the tanning bed in the back, for the rest of the year.

I took off my layers and piled them on the table, hoping to dry them off a bit in the warm air of the restaurant. The entire staff was one woman in her late teens. She took my order and then walked behind various dividers, fixing my mountain of cheap food. As I was eating, groups of teenagers wandered in to patronize the soda fountain, filling up different containers and gossiping with each other. It was like hanging out in the kitchen of a long-running television sitcom. I wouldn't have been surprised to see The Fonz wander in and flirt with the cashier.

There was a lot of food, but it wasn't very good. I boxed the leftovers and purchased a few more snax, then reapplied my layers of clothing and got back on the road. I rode east on a long flat highway through scattered forest, then turned north and entered a landscape of hills and fog. Through this I zig-zagged north and east towards North Manchester, and the Bed and Breakfast I'd called earlier in the day.

"Snuff" was turning out to be a really good book. I took my time on the roads, enjoying the eerie silhouettes of the barns and houses, the winding branches of the winter trees, and the gigantic steel electric towers looming overhead, all enfolded by waves of pale mist that turned my headlight beam into a solid object and felt wonderful in my lungs.


The ride was lovely but I got to the resort very late. Twenty minutes after hauling my bags up to the cluttered bedroom on the second floor, I was asleep, with the wind howling in the eaves.

The Amtrak station turned out to be a bench inside a booth with no actual employees around. A schedule posted on the back of the booth listed two trains that stopped at the station only a few times each week, and the latest train had rolled past at 10:00am while I was still packing my things up at the motel. No train service for me. Might as well ride on, despite my complaining legs.

I ate at a run-down diner and got the usual amount of attention and the usual questions from the half-dozen customers and staff. The waitress brought me an omelet that covered my entire plate and was bursting with veggies, and between that and the hash browns I had to ask for a to-go container. While I ate I amused myself with a theatrical radio performance of "At The Mountains Of Madness". So many books and radio shows, so little time and attention!

The wind was blowing from the south, which didn't help me when I rode east but made riding north a breeze. (Pun intended!) I zig-zagged my way northeast towards the state border, thinking about the wind. It wasn't blowing against me when I rode east, but it still seemed to make forward progress harder. Why was that? If I thought about it just in terms of mathematical vectors it didn't make sense. Was it just my perception?

The scenery drifted by for several hours as I chewed on the problem, and finally I came up with something that seemed to explain it. Basically, the wind was trying to push me over, and to compensate I leaned slightly to the side, into the wind, and converted some of that wind pressure into downward force onto the road, which increased my rolling resistance. So the only really favorable wind for a bicyclist is wind that comes from behind, and any other direction is actually unfavorable. Percentage-wise, that sucks!

I rolled up to a gas station that was hosting a charity fund-raiser of some kind, with parents and kids gathered around a sign-up table and talking about local schools -- I couldn't hear the details. I could feel dozens of eyeballs on me as I kickstanded the bike and went inside in search of junk food. One kid came up and nervously asked what kind of bike I was riding, and when I told him it was a recumbent he thanked me and scurried shyly away. Points to you, kid, for being brave!

With my mind no longer puzzling over windspeed and momentum, I decided to continue listening to "The Worst Hard Time". The last time I listened to this book was during a bicycle trip to Pinnacles National Monument, years ago, and I only got as far as the beginning of the crash, when everything started to go downhill. It felt appropriate to resume it now, since I was still passing through mostly farmland. The story it told was stunning, and brutal.

In the late 1910's, citizens were encouraged by the federal government to take part in a land-grab in western Texas, Oaklahoma, and other states, for purposes of farming. They broke up the soil of the Great Plains, ripped away the tall grass, and drilled wells for water. Some of those people were my ancestors, the Birkles, living in Shattuck, Oaklahoma. Life was difficult but they turned a profit through their crops and their cattle and found some happiness. Then the weather turned against them. And then the economy tanked.

As the 1930's began, the entirety of the Great Plains entered a period of relentless drought. No one expected it to last as long as it did. No one had kept any records to study. In retrospect it explained why the Great Plains was covered with grass and not forest: Grass could endure the cycles of drought, trees could not. But now the grass was all ripped away, leaving dry soil to bake in the sun - and get picked up by the wind. Enormous curtains of dust began to roll over the land with increasing frequency and severity.

It blanketed homesteads, turning day into night. Dust would seep in through tiny cracks around every window and door, and no amount of cleaning would remove it all. People would wake up in the morning with a clean white silhouette of their head on an otherwise black pillow.  They would get up and shovel drifts of dust off their doorsteps, then away from their windows to let in light. After big storms they would have to dig out their cattle. The dust was sharp and built up enormous charges of static electricity in anything made of metal. People tended to avoid shaking hands because they could potentially knock each other down with the discharge. Gardens that weren't simply torn apart by the wind were sometimes electrocuted to death instead.

Cattle could not find anything to eat. Not a single blade of grass in the dirt.  They got so hungry they would chew on fenceposts. Owners crushed up tumbleweed and mixed it with salt, and the cattle survived on that for a while, but they all either starved to death or were shot - to put them out of their misery - or were filled up with so much dust that they could no longer digest food. Same thing with people.  Doctors would open them up and find dirt packed inside them. This is not some fiction writer's idea of a horrifying what-if scenario, this is what happened. At some point these people would accumulate too much dust and lapse into what was called "dust fever", and then in a matter of days they would die. Some people just went insane, wandering the streets, their land or their children abandoned.

By the middle of the 1930's, dust storms were blowing through northern Texas at an average of one every three days. In 1935, northern Texas got one short rainstorm for the entire year, allowing some farmers to raise meager, stunted crops ... and then a plague of grasshoppers descended on the fields and ate everything down to the ground.  They crawled over the polished handles of the shovels, trying to eat them, too. The National Guard tried to crush the pests with massive rollers and poison them but it made no difference.

The year 1935 brought one of the worst, and the most documented, dust storms of the entire era. The day it struck was named "Black Sunday". Several people in Dalhart TX were struck blind by the flying grit from this storm and never recovered their sight. It was the event that pushed the federal government into full action and led to an avalanche of recovery programs, assistance, and legislation, some of which is still in place.

In Kansas, on the first day of bicycling for this trip, I passed through the Comanche National Grassland, which is one of the preserves that was established by the New Deal as part of the land restoration effort. Even that grassland does not look like it did before the dust bowl.

And guess what!  Seventy years later, and we're still floundering in the aftermath, still requiring major course corrections! What a world. I honestly don't know what to do about it. In the broadest sense, there will always be people interested in having a go at living in a location that is not suitable for farming, necessitating either inefficient shipping or destructive terraforming. Always.  Not even the highest most electrified barbed-wire fence or the direst warnings would keep them out. What solution is available, for such a tragedy of the commons?

Boy, I sure did go all-out on that digression. Let's bring things back on track with these lovely photos of a nest and an Osage orange I took today:


As I was pedaling through the side-wind, headed east and enjoying my book and some chocolate, a woman drove up alongside me and offered me a banana from the open window of her car, leaning over her young son who gazed at me from the passenger seat. "Do you need something to eat? I've got this," she yelled at me.

I was dumbstruck but I held my composure. She was just trying to be friendly. I turned her down as gently as I could. She wished me luck, then pulled ahead of me into a driveway to reverse the vehicle, and went back down the road. She had pursued me to offer me a banana. Strange...

The book was fascinating and before I knew it, the sun had set:



I pedaled on into the night, eventually stopping on a small bridge behind a cluster of trees growing along a riverbank. Here I rested for a while, enjoying the shelter from the wind and snacking on the remains of the omelet. A few pairs of headlights drifted past me but I averted my eyes, lest they think I was encouraging them to stop by looking at them. People are inclined to be helpful and I didn't want them to feel silly for that urge.

The stop was uneventful and after about 20 minutes I was back on the road. Five minutes later a truck rambled up alongside me, and since it was obvious the driver wanted to engage in some sort of dialogue I hit the brakes. Once my eyes adjusted from the glare in my rearview mirror, I saw a man and a woman sitting side-by-side. The woman leaned out the window and said she'd spotted me while driving the other way about 20 minutes ago, asked how I was doing, and then, with a hint of shyness and embarrassment, offered me a roast-beef sandwich that she had prepared at home especially for me.

I was beyond flattered by this - I was touched. I have always had a serious soft-spot for people cooking or preparing food just for me. Something from a shelf or a package I could take or leave, but something prepared by hand, with me in mind?

We chatted for a while and I eventually accepted the sandwich with as much grace as I could muster. I tucked it away and forgot about it until late that evening, when I took it out and got a closer look:


They even threw in a wee chocolate for dessert! Aawwwwww! I don't know who you are, but you guys are the greatest! Thank you!!

I kept on cycling and zig-zagged my way over the state border, crossing into Indiana on highway 18. There was no sign for me to photograph myself next to ... oh well. I saw rows of red lights on poles in the distance all around me, blinking in unison. I couldn't figure out what they were for. There was no airport around, according to the map... Any ideas?

I also paused at the foot of a hill and made this nifty recording of the wind:

11-12-11 10:03pm - Wind

At long last I arrived at the Pheasant Country Bed And Breakfast, in Fowler, Indiana. The proprietor woke up to let me in, and served me tea while we talked about travel and bicycles. She asked lots of enthusiastic questions and I enjoyed her company, but I was exhausted, so pretty soon I stumbled up to bed. What a day!

Today I stayed in the motel room, writing and doing laundry. The dryer in the front hall only tumbled my clothes, and did not actually dry them, so I hung the clothing from hooks and poles all over the room and cranked the heat. I was totally in my MAN CAVE! My only adventure outside was to the restaurant across the street, where I acted antisocial by propping up the iPad and watching old episodes of The Daily Show as I devoured two meals' worth of food.

It was good to catch up on my writing, and my legs really needed the rest. They were sucking up every ounce of protein I could stuff into myself. Even with prodigious snacking I was running a slow calorie deficit. I noticed that my reflection in the bathroom mirror had less body fat on it than three weeks ago.

I was late getting out of the motel room, but the manager didn't seem to mind. I'd been trying to get an alternate GPS track to display on my iPad so I could refer to it later in the day, and of course, it was a new procedure so it took longer than I wanted. I had to find a way to convert a KML file from Google Maps into a GPX file that my software would understand.

I ate breakfast at the local cafe. The waitress and I fell into talking about bicycles and the west coast, and she revealed that she'd grown up in San Diego but then moved back to Illinois because she "got into some trouble". I didn't ask what kind of trouble it was. Upon arrival, she'd married her high-school sweetheart, settled down, and raised a family in the same area that her own parents had lived for many years. I couldn't decide if it sounded idyllic or disappointing, so I just kept the subject on California. She was in her fifties at least, but surprisingly good-looking for her age. I think it was her personality more than anything else.

Anyway, I devoured an omelet and a salad, nodded at all the patrons who were staring at me and my bicycle, and then took off. On my way out of town I rode into a headwind so strong that I was almost unable to move at all - a wind of some 45 or 50mph I estimate - and it was so ridiculous that I started laughing. Eventually I got to a bend in the road and a windbreak of trees, and as I cruised safely behind them the wind changed course and slowed down. Now it was just 20mph ... but still blowing in my face.

I'd finished Reamde yesterday, so I queued up something totally different - a long, tempestuous book about the modern cinema called "The Good, The Bad, And The Multiplex" - and listened to it at double-speed to keep it interesting. The first chapter is a rather belligerent rant aimed at the author's local movie house and it's management, and I found it borderline intolerable, but in the remaining chapters he calms down quite a bit and makes some very interesting points about financing, reviewing, promoting, and presenting movies, and floats some sensible propositions on how to improve all of these.

Sometime in the middle of the day I paused for a snack break on a wide bridge, and looked down in time to catch a train crossing beneath me. Look at all that coal!



The book and the snacks kept me steaming along all the way to the town of Havana, where I rumbled up over a dangerous metal bridge spanning a wide river, and then had to pull into a parking lot to catch my breath and re-gather my wits. Bridges like that always freak me out.

A woman rolled up next to me in her car, cranked down her window, and said "What're you doing out in the cold and where are you going?"

I'd just done a death defying ride over a bridge and was not in a witty mood, and thought she was being a bit intrusive, so I responded to her first question and ignored her second. "... I'm riding my bike."

"Oh," she said. "It's just that I do Warm Showers and I didn't know you needed a place to stay!"

Warm Showers is a website where people offer room and/or board to transient cross-country cyclists. She was apparently surprised that I hadn't contacted her to arrange a layover. Honestly, the idea of using the Warm Showers service hadn't occurred to me at any point in the planning or execution of my trip, and standing there in the parking lot, I was at a loss to explain why. Perhaps it was because I knew I would be traveling alone, and that presented a different balance of risks. But regardless of that, I was placed on the defensive by this woman's intrusiveness, and so I felt predisposed to turn down anything she offered.

"I'm not stopping here -- just passing through," I said.

"Oh," she said. "Oh well; have a good trip."

"Thank you!" I said.

She drove away. She was clearly trying to be nice, but I was put off. Partly by her manner, and partly by something else:

The Ambiguity Of Cars

When you're on a bicycle, cars are death monsters. You spend your time trying to keep distance from them. You wish they would all just disappear. When you're on a bike - or even just walking around, for that matter - and someone drives right up next to you in a car and starts blurting words at you, it makes you nervous. It's like you're walking around in the woods, and suddenly you're approached by a woodcutter who wants to have a friendly chat with you, but he's carrying a running chainsaw casually in one hand. What are his intentions?

Same sort of thing with drivers zooming up to you. People don't even realize their mistake, because most people have never had it happen to them. But cross-country bicyclists deal with it all the time.

People will cruise up within inches of you at a stoplight and ask "where ya goin'?", expecting an answer while you're madly trying to determine if they intend to go straight or turn right when the light changes, potentially obliterating your bicycle and ending your life. If you don't respond, you're the rude one.

People will honk their horns at you as they drive by, startling you as you attempt to balance on a narrow strip of shoulder, and unless you look up into their window and parse their faces and their upraised hands, you'll never know if they were honking because they want to encourage you and cheer you on, or because they hate the sight of you and intend to plow you into a ditch.

People will slow down to a crawl behind you, stacking up the traffic, even though you've given them the entire open lane to pass you by, while you ride over rocks and garbage in the gutter to make yourself as small as possible. They will hover there, and you have no idea if they are displaying chivalry and waiting for a clear oncoming lane so they can veer into it and give you a wide, respectful berth - or if they are malevolently cursing you for having the nerve to ride such a ridiculously slow contraption on their highway, and getting ready to scream at you or throw something at you from an open window as they shoot forward. You have no idea because you can hear them, but you can't see them.

In all of these cases, people are either trying to be model citizens, or they are planning to seriously endanger you, and you have absolutely no idea which it is, until it happens.

And so it went, with this woman shooting up next to me and barking questions. I just wanted to be rid of her. Of course I felt bad afterwards for being so cold. But she was in a car -- she just drove off, and there was no way I could catch up and apologize if I wanted to. If she'd approached me on foot, the conversation would have been entirely different. I would have probably made a new friend.

Bah! Whatever. I ate dinner at a local restaurant, and then headed east, on the long straight ribbon of highway 136. I finished up "The Good, The Bad, And The Multiplex" and listened to some crazy radio comedy shows for a while. (I really need to send some of these to Ken!) Then I went for something different, a series of lectures called "The Science Of Influence", by a fellow named Kevin Hogan who is basically a motivational speaker. Not my usual fare, but it really got my brain cooking. I'll comment on that in a separate post.

I listened to the first segment of that and then decided to switch gears again, to a series of lectures by professor Anthony Goodman, called "The Myths of Nutrition and Fitness". Neat stuff.

Did you know that by traveling from sea level to 6000 feet, you double the amount of water lost from your body from breathing?

Did you know that humans are unique among land animals in that they can vary their gait to match their pace and intelligently manage their energy expenditure, and can therefore outrun any other land animal, if they get to choose the distance? Sure a cheetah can run 65 mph, but for how far? Sure a horse can run all day, but how long does it take to speed up in a 30-yard sprint? Interesting food for thought. Maybe humans aren't weaklings after all.

Anyway, I rode over a bunch of hills and made a lot of pee stops and noshed on a bag of chips, and finally I rolled into McLean after 1:00am. Before I found the motel I passed by a gigantic gas station and restaurant, with an incredible variety of trucks parked nearby. Many of them were running their cooling units to preserve their cargo.


The noise was amazing, so I tried to record it on my phone, thus:

11-10-11 1:29 AM: Them's a lot of trucks!

... Then I zipped over to the motel, booked two nights, sat in the shower like an exhausted lump, and crawled into bed.

The laundromat was three miles across town, and rain was belting down out of the sky, so I did my laundry by flinging it into the shower and stomping on it, then rinsing it off and hanging it near the wall heater. I had to blast the room with heat for most of the day, but the clothes did dry. Meanwhile I sat around with my shirt off and enjoyed the tropical vacation.

Almost all my waking hours were consumed in writing, and organizing photos. I also chatted with Andy and Erika, and ate a meal at the diner just down the street. In the evening I took a break from my break from my break, and strolled over to the local movie theatre to catch "Harold and Kumar's Very 3D Christmas". It was still raining so I wore my raincoat:



When I returned from the movie (it was hilarious) I did more journal crud. By the time I rolled into bed I was exhausted, just from sitting around and typing. But my legs felt better. Ready for more cycling!

This day was probably the low point of the trip. I did feel better from the food poisoning of yesterday, but my sleep had been disrupted, and the terrain ahead of me was an endless grind over long hills, on a dirty highway shoulder, next to loud and relentless traffic, into a constant headwind.

I was expecting a certain amount of attention for riding a bike cross-country. I knew there would be lots of questions and conversations, and I was okay with that - looking forward to it, in fact. And in Kansas, I enjoyed those conversations. People would always ask slightly different things, and they would occasionally tell anecdotes of their own or describe local landmarks I should check out.

But here in Missouri, especially today, it feels different.

FOUR TIMES today, I have been sitting alone in a restaurant with my bike just outside the window, or walking the aisles of a grocery store, and someone has wandered up to me with a vague grin on their face and just stared for a while, as though I was an unexpectedly elaborate highway accident.

The conversation is always the same:

"... Is that your bike?"
"Yeah."
"Where ya headed?"
"New York."
"Oh!"

... and then they wander away.

It's not really the content of the conversation that bothers me, or the lack of courtesy. It's the staring.

On my way out of Brookfield I went to a supermarket and bought two heads of romaine lettuce, then washed and ate one sitting on the edge of the parking lot, because I wanted something green to stabilize my digestion. Every car that went in, and every car that went out, did so at a crawl, to get the maximum amount of rubbernecking available before drifting out of range.

I did my best to ignore it, and then set out on the highway listening to a bunch of old comedy from Billy Connolly, which lifted my spirits. His interludes on the banjo were a perfect fit to the deep autumn landscape that scrolled around me.



I also found this little fellow:


Sometime in the afternoon I descended into a big valley, which I was grateful for at first because it was a reprieve from hill-climbing, but about a quarter mile across it the headwind became twice as bad. I took frequent breaks and ate many snacks, but my knees were bothering me from the constant effort. It was totally impossible to coast without being blown to a stop in moments by the wind.

When I got to Shelbina, I discovered that the one motel in the town had been booked solid with hunters. The lady behind the desk was unsympathetic - more interested in her television program than anything else - and said my only choice was to keep on going until I got to Monroe City, about 20 miles farther east. So I got back on the road, plodding along in the dark with my audiobook and taking bites from the big wax-coated hunk of cheddar cheese I'd bought from Miss Kitty. About an hour into the ride, I was struck with a powerful desire for Pho. Perhaps I needed more salt?

If only this industrial structure I passed on the way was making salt... Mmmm...


Monroe City had two motels. A third was out of business, its parking lot filthy and its topiary overgrown. The first motel I tried did not answer when I rang the night bell, so I assumed it was full and proceeded to the second. I counted twenty trucks in the parking lot, but over 30 rooms, so I felt I had a chance.

I rung the night bell and a sleepy man with a very thick Mexican accent unlocked the door. One night in a room: 39 dollars. The bed looked questionable so I chucked my sleeping bag on top.

After 80 miles and 2000 feet of climbing, I was exhausted, and I knew I wasn't going to get enough sleep. I fell asleep wondering if I should find some alternate method of transport to Elmira, NY, so I didn't have to sustain such a breakneck pace.

In my first dream, I was a young woman working in a resort as a maid. As I did my chores I was being threatened by two large men, and I was worried that I didn't have enough family members around to defend me.

One of my chores was to take a basket of laundry to the lodge basement, at the bottom of an old staircase. I placed the basket at the foot of the stairs, but when I started climbing back up, I got a nervous feeling and turned around again. Wraiths and demons were seething up from the basket, making ribbons of colored vapor. They were furious with me. If they touched me I would die. As long as I kept watching them, they could not advance, but I needed to turn around to keep climbing the irregular stairs. I turned around and ran for it, feeling icy hands reach for my neck.

Then I woke up in the dingy hotel room. I realized that what I'd just seen as a demon on a staircase was actually the light from a streetlamp, edging around the thick curtains of the window. I realized that the screaming of demons was actually the whistles from two trains passing only a mile or so away.

It took me some time to calm down again.

In my second dream, I was standing in a kitchen that was actually the command module of a spacecraft. The whole room was mounted on a multi-stage rocket, and it was about to take off for an expedition on the moon. I heard a thunderous blast and felt the floor shake beneath me, and I looked out the window to see the land slowly sinking below the sill.

Then the land began to drift sideways. Something was wrong with the stabilizers in the rocket. The launch was going to fail. Everything in a half-mile radius was going to be immolated in a super-hot explosion of fuel and shrapnel, and I was at the center. I was absolutely guaranteed to die in less than a minute, as soon as the rocket toppled over.

"Oh well, that's it then," I said to myself.

But then I had an idea. Could we fire the stage-separation mechanism, and blast a little distance away from the primary stage of the rocket, to get out of the explosion, and then deploy the landing parachute? I turned, and spoke to a crew member, a grandmotherly woman in spectacles wearing a dish apron.

"Yes," she said. "I think we can do that!"

She poked some buttons and there was another blast, and the room jolted sideways, then ground slowly to a halt as the capsule dug a deep furrow in the face of a hillside, miles from the rest of the rocket.

"That was close," I thought. Then I woke up.