Week One

No, really. Just before departure, what am I thinking about? We've been planning for this and working towards it for the last six months, trying out possible combinations for routes, equipment, paces. I've learned a bit about bike maintenance and repair. Gear. Geography. I've trained, though not arduously: I don't bike around the city, don't actually like to. (If you don't understand why not, I suggest you try it sometime and then I suspect you'll sympathize about the unique insanities of the Boston species of motorist.) Nah, mostly I've done longish weekend trips, gradually increasing mileage and weight in my trailer. I figure the first week will be one of the hardest, my thighs will probably be nigh-audibly cursing at me for a few days, but I'm okay with that. So how, really, do I feel right now?

The last time I sat around with all my atoms bouncing irritably off each other, wanting to take off, was about seven years ago, when I'd been planning a trip to the U.K. for an entire year. The amazing thing about that was how much I tried to plan and how inadequately prepared I still was. Picture this 21-year-old naif, traipsing about with an ancient backpack slung uncomfortably over her like a bearskin rug and boggling at most of what she saw, thinking "Let's Go" was going to give her all the answers.

And yet, what made that trip great for me was all the things I couldn't have planned for. These Irish guys making bets on me as to whether I was Swedish - and the loser, in good grace, taking me to a discotheque and then taking off work the next day to show me the hidden beauties of Dublin. Ditching plans in England to go blackberrying and coming back to the States with scratches like a latticework of silly joy up my arms. Meeting these drunk Scots in Edinburgh at about 4 a.m., walking back to my hostel, and - yes, honestly - going back with them to their flat for sandwiches and coffee. Was I nervous? Yes. Were they the best sandwiches and coffee I've ever had? Mmmhmmm - one of them turned out to be a gourmet chef. And did they save my ass the next day, when a BritRail strike started and I had to skedaddle out of town with almost no warning? Oh, yes.

I figure this is going to be about the same. Sure, we've got our route planned out, people to visit along the way, and (in case you hadn't heard yet) Burning Man to attend on the other side of the continent. But I figure the magic will be growing up out of the cracks, giggling in the nooks and crannies. So there's my predictions for ya: no matter how hard we've tried, we're going to be thrown for a loop by being unprepared at some point, and the best stuff will be things we never could have planned for. And my thighs are going to hurt.

I'll letcha know in three months how right I was.

Weeelll, day one-fourth. Or something. We weren't exactly self-congratulatory that we were getting a splendidly early start or anything - having been up packing until three a.m. - but we thought we were doing okay. Off for brekky at one of my favorite places in Boston, SoundBites Cafe, where part of the charm is the barrage of smarmy jibes from the owner. I was kind of knuckle-polishingly telling him that we were setting off that morning to start our bike trip, Maine to San Fransisco, and he returned, "You get on a plane, you be there in a few hours." So much for me and my bombasticism.

Anyway, we got rather a later start than we'd hoped, and the day kind of streeetttcccchhhed from there. Took longer to take off, took longer to drive, and then once we'd finally found a good launching point, we discovered that though our bikes might well be seaworthy - we dipped the rear wheels in the Atlantic, just to make the point - they weren't roadworthy. So it was off to find a bike shop to repair some minor damage they'd incurred by, um, falling off the car. Yes, really.

The day finally took a swing for the better at that point; we were headed up to Camden, thinking, "bigger town, more likelihood of bike shop," and David was literally just saying, "Unless we happen to see a really obvious sign, 'Bike shop here,'" when we happened to see a really obvious sign, "Bike shop here." Like, a bicycle sticking almost out into the road, of an adventure sports store. We went in and made big eyes at them and they took pity on us and repaired our bikes and even pretended they didn't think we were complete dorks. Then it was back to the launch pad, where we had the requisite rear-wheels-in-Atlantic-cum-photo-op, and finally we set off. By that point it was five thirty p.m., so we didn't get far - all of 13 miles - but we were glad we'd at least started the trek that day.

And then our luck continued. We pulled into Loons Cry Campground in Wiscasset, only to find the office unmanned and a sign up, "Gone fishing, will return." We decided it was a euphemism for "take off, hosers, we'll be back when we get back" and went to help ourselves to a campsite. When I returned later, there was a woman there, Shannon Wolfe it turned out, and I explained where we'd camped. She was appreciative that I'd bothered to come back and tell her and we had a little conversation about what Molly and I were doing, the end result of which was that she offered us a land line connection from her own RV and ended up giving us fruit, quarters for the shower, and plenty of positive attention. Mad props to Shannon! I really liked it that she stressed how important it was to her to know that there were women in the world doing this sort of thing. "Be careful," she cautioned us; "I'll be praying for you every day." And then, "And have the times of your lives!"

We hope to, Shannon. Thanks for helping it start out that way.

An even less auspicious beginning, given that we needed mongo sleep after so little the night before. We headed out at some time significantly after eleven a.m., with big hopes of doing 40 or 50 miles that day.

And here I should mention something of terrific relevance to me.

About two weeks ago, I started experiencing something previously unknown to me - chronic shortness of breath. Inability to draw in a deep breath, as if something were constricting inside my ribcage. I've been breathing up into my shoulders and neck and mouth, which is a rather unpleasant sensation as it is (and makes for extremely tense shoulders) and nigh-gasping for breath at times. As little fun as that is, it's far the worse when trying to, oh, bike 40 or 50 miles. Carrying 45 pounds behind me. Up GODAWFUL INSANE CRAZY MASSIVE HILLS.

I mean, why wasn't I alerted? Why did I not receive a bulletin. "Colleen: Maine has hills. The sort of things that someone from, say, Boston would label 'mountains' and not think herself facetious for doing so. It's gonna bite. Big time." Why didn't somebody, like, skywrite this to me? Geez. Suck. So I'd make it partway up a hill and basically whimper and die, sometimes have to get off and walk up, wheezing all the way. This is not conducive to feeling like an extremely butch biker babe, which was, of course, the intent of the whole trip.

The consensus seems to be, from everyone who has noticed that I'm basically dying for air, is that I have asthma. Just like that. Two weeks before my cross-country bike trip.

Somebody is laughing.

So we made it all of five miles on the Hills of Death and then pooped out at Moody's Diner. I should mention that Moody's Diner rocks my happy little world. They totally totally blew us away. Excellent food. Go visit them. Drive up from Boston.

So we made it all of five miles on the Hills of Death and then pooped out at Moody's Diner. I should mention that Moody's Diner rocks my happy little world. They totally totally blew us away. Excellent food. Go visit them. Drive up from Boston.

The rest of the day was a succession of "wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" followed by "oh god oh god oh god oh go- I can't make it." Molly was a trooper (duh!), encouraging me endlessly, congratulating me at the top, always letting me rest, but I felt like such a downer. Big Karmic Bum. Ah well.

Another interesting thing about the day was the rain, or rather, lack thereof. The skies endlessly threatened - chortled down a few drops on us, always making us reach for rain jackets (which, unless you need them, are nasty - sticky gross things), but never really letting loose. Until we pulled into a Denny's for dinner and, like a benediction, a flare across the sky and a massive clap of thunder. A few minutes later, it was a deluge.

Unsurprisingly, we decided to treat ourselves to a cheap motel that night, replete with Vending Machines and A Sink for Washing Underwear and other such earthly delights. There was one only a few blocks from the Denny's, for which we were profoundly grateful. We were again up far too late (four a.m. ahem.), trying to fix the glitches in the website, which is taking forever to actually come together, figure out our route in New Hampshire, etc. Ah well. Happy sleep, when it finally came.

The check-out clerk at the motel became my personal hero when he assured us that we were beyond the worst of the hills. We followed Rte 1 for most of the day, down through Portland, and he was right; it wasn't always fun, occasionally I'd moan, "No, no, make it go away," but for the most part I survived significantly better than I had the day before. Granted, I've been surviving on Albuterol, a bronchodilator inhaler which a friend gave me right before I left. It helps immensely, and though I don't actually feel like I'm wafting gracefully to the tops of hills, I'm not dead, either. Though my legs occasionally remind me that they would like me to be. Grumpy critters.

Did anything interesting happen today? Hrm. Well, again we got a very late start, and again we did about forty miles, a wee bit more - exact same as yesterday. I hope we start a different trend tomorrow, and my current plan is to go to a community clinic which I've been told is quite good. Everyone cross yer fingers for me. I don't know whether to hope that I've got asthma or that I don't. I mean, asthma would suck, right, but you can keep it under control with meds...? Or there's the Just Plain Inexplicable, which could well suck worse.

Portland seems to be a nice town, btw. They've got this kind of river-fronty sort of drive (marsh-front? I don't know Maine landscape terminology that well) that was excellent for biking along. And unlike Boston, drivers seem to notice us wee bikers and even - gasp! -yield to us with a fair amount of grace. This may be because we look so amazingly studly, or perhaps it's the funky trailers behind us, or perhaps they're afraid we're some weird crazed biker chicks who might do something horrible like expire on their car if they don't give us wide berth. Anyway, it made for a mostly pleasant biking experience.

We ended the day at the Wild Duck Campground, which is adult-only. I'd never before heard of such a thing, no one under 21 admitted, which when I first heard about it made me wonder what exactly happens in an adult-only campground. Er. I mean, is there a place set aside for orgies or something? But no, just no kids. Frankly, though, I'd far rather have had children permitted than the inexcusable conglomeration of mosquitoes. Six landed on me within the first minute of getting off my bike. I am SO not kidding. Geeeez. Anyway, other than that it was pleasant enough, the wild ducklings were yummy...er, I mean cute...and the infestation of chipmunks was significantly more tolerable than that of the mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, there were still kinks to be worked out: no website yet! Yes, I know, I'm writing this for an audience who isn't yet reading it. And there are other little things, such as the fact that my legs ache so badly, lying on the ground, that they wake me up every hour or so. I'm trying to find a way of dealing with it. Lack of restful sleep on top of inability to breathe does not make for fantastic biking.

Yep.

I got up about as early as we'd gotten up late the last few days, helped myself to a shower in the 55-degree weather (believe me, I had no competition for the shower stalls at 6 a.m., especially at a campsite where almost everyone else is in RVs), and headed out for the Scarborough Health Care clinic.

Molly suggests I tell you instead about the river we forded and the mighty blizzard that we bulled through, and I said that no, I felt her descriptive powers were more up to the task. Also the pygmies we conquered who now revere us as gods, but eh, that's old hat. I suspect you'd far rather hear about my medical woes. They certainly interest me. If you're not into the tale of my medical woes, go read Into Thin Air or Richard Burton's accounts of Africa instead and come back tomorrow.

So I biked out to the clinic - only about 6 miles, and it probably would have been very pleasant if 1) I weren't in rush hour traffic and 2) I could breathe. Not hauling 45 pounds was a rush, though. Anyway, clinic. They did indeed rock, as it had been portended. Everyone was really nice and must have gotten A+s in their Bedside Manner classes. I described my problem and they got me right into a room and started poking and prodding at me as gently as possible. Chest X-rays, listening to breathing, breathing into a little tube and then lots more times into lots and lots of tubes, EKG, doses of Albuterol and mega-massive-doses of saline & Albuterol through a Nebulizer (no, I didn't make up the word), yadda yadda. By the end of it I was plenty jittery from the Albuterol (makes yer hands shake), and woozy, and they even brought me an English muffin and peanut butter. So sweet! However, all the niceness in the world didn't make up for the fact that they couldn't just sa! y, "oh, sure, you have asthma, have this prescription and you'll be fine."

No, they wanted me to either go to a pulmonologist or go home or both. They said that my breathing patterns weren't characteristic of asthma - I don't have trouble exhaling, just a feeling of restriction (and eventual blowout entirely, if I push it too hard) on inhaling. They said my diaphragm was hyper-inflated, which means that it was expanding below where most people's do - something that they normally only see in, oh, 50-year-old emphysema patients who've been smoking ferociously their whole lives.

What did I want to do? Should they call the hospital and try to schedule me an appointment with a pulmonologist?

.........Okay.

They left and I pretty much completely and utterly broke down. See, the thing is, I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell this story. I was wanting this to be another story entirely, of great adventures biking; or if nothing else, telling you what I think about America. The breathing thing of the last two weeks, well, I was hoping it was just the stress of preparing for the trip and wanting it to be now already, and that once the trip started, I'd be fine. I'd be the butch biker chick you've all come to know and love, or at least laugh at while she's a dork on her website. But this trip means a tremendous lot to me; it would take me hours, perhaps, to describe my credo adequately to even put it in a context where it would make sense to the casual reader, but believe me, there's an awful lot for me, emotionally, riding on this trip. So yes, the concept of having to give up my entire summer plans and watch six months of planning and training and expenses spiral down the dr! ain is incredibly sucky. But it really is worse than that for me, that there's this inherent dysfunction, this "no. no, really, this can't be happening," a disconnect, an inability to accept that it really can just fall apart that quickly and inexplicably. I'm not looking to get into a deep discussion of my philosophy at this point, but I figure you can all understand to some degree what I mean by saying that I pretty much lost it then. I cried so hard I was choking, staring incongruously at all this weird medical equipment that I really didn't want to know the function of and not able to assimilate the simple fact that this whole trip really might not happen.

They came back to tell me that a Dr. McArdle at Maine Medical Center in Portland could take me at 3:15, a few hours away, so I said I'd take it. I went and paid my bill - a cool $566, and no, I don't have insurance, but that's another story and I have no right to complain about any of it. Biked back to camp, though the RN who'd been taking care of me came pretty close to insisting that she give me a ride; but I was feeling pretty fierce by then, and it really isn't that much of a distance, so I politely refused and took my hills and headwinds like a big girl.

Yadda yadda yadda basic emergency room admittance garbage later, I got to see Dr. McArdle. Unsurpringly, I wasn't in the mood to notice whether or not he was married, but I do remember thinking to myself that if he weren't, he must be a hell of an Eligible Bachelor, being an attractive nice young medical specialist. I, on the other hand, was feeling like a rather pitiful specimen of Beat-Upon Whimpering Failed Cyclist, and especially so by the time he'd finished doing unpleasant things to me. Still reading? Wanna skip the part where he inserts things into various orifices? Well, he did. He gave me some nasal decongestant, squirted my nose full of the unguent version of Novocain, sprayed my mouth and throat with something that tasted something like a banana-daiquiri flavored bug repellent and caused the reaction you'd expect from having such a thing wafted at high velocity at the back of your mouth, and then guided a tiny camera thing down the back of my throat. Yes, ! through my nose. I came pretty darn close to a panic attack, which is odd, because it's not like it hurt, nor could I even perceive it well enough to feel that it was invasive. It was just this wrong thing that was being done to my body. Ick ick ick.

It did, however, tell him what he wanted to know. And just to impress all of you, I had him write it down (not that that's always a sure thing, with doctors) so I could put it up on this website. Hence, for your delectation: I have Laryngeal Dyskinesia. Hah. I bet you don't. I bet you don't even know what it means.

I'm not going to go into a lengthy explanation, because I really expect that'd be boring to everyone but me and my mother, but the short version is this: there are these folds of tissue over the vocal cords that normally bend down to cover and protect them from things such as coughing, but that are paradoxically slamming down shut on me when I breathe in. Hence, I have to suck air in very hard just to be able to get a decent breath. And hence, when I'm biking up a killer hill lugging 45 pounds behind me, there's just no way to get enough oxygen.

What's the procedure for dealing with this? Twofold: speech therapist, who teaches you to exercise some control over those muscles (they're partially voluntary), and anti-anxiety drugs. Valium is right out: it's both a sedative - baaaad for biking 50 miles a day - and addictive. The one he wants me to use is, I think I remember this right, Bucerol (don't quote me on that), but it takes 7-10 days to kick in. Meanwhile, the speech therapy thing takes time to learn as well.

Dr. McArdle is going to try to get me an appointment with a speech therapist tomorrow. So it looks like we'll be in Portland/Scarborough yet again, or at least for part of the day; I doubt we're going to be making any decent mileage, if any at all. As to the larger implications?

I don't like thinking too hard about that. We'll deal with it as we deal with it.

I still have a lot of questions -like, why does the Albuterol help, if I don't have asthma? (He doesn't think I do.) Why doesn't the hyper-inflation of my diaphragm ameliorate the problem with the glottis tissue? How in the world can we be blithely accepting George W. Bush as a president? Hopefully some of these will be resolved soon. Hopefully, in a few weeks time, I'll just look back on all this and smile, "whoof, look, I'm so cool, I even managed to bike with this big ole dysfunction sucking my energy away."

Hopefully.

Now, we're going to be complete slugs, go eat pizza and watch a movie or something. And just keep "hopefully" to ourselves...

We ended the day at the Wild Duck Campground, which is adult-only. I'd never before heard of such a thing, no one under 21 admitted, which when I first heard about it made me wonder what exactly happens in an adult-only campground. Er. I mean, is there a place set aside for orgies or something? But no, just no kids. Frankly, though, I'd far rather have had children permitted than the inexcusable conglomeration of mosquitoes. Six landed on me within the first minute of getting off my bike. I am SO not kidding. Geeeez. Anyway, other than that it was pleasant enough, the wild ducklings were yummy...er, I mean cute...and the infestation of chipmunks was significantly more tolerable than that of the mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, there were still kinks to be worked out: no website yet! Yes, I know, I'm writing this for an audience who isn't yet reading it. And there are other little things, such as the fact that my legs ache so badly, lying on the ground, that they wake me up every hour or so. I'm trying to find a way of dealing with it. Lack of restful sleep on top of inability to breathe does not make for fantastic biking.

Another day, another diagnosis.

Very little happened today except for waiting around until I heard from Dr. McArdle and then picking up the prescription he recommended.  The conversation was, unsurprisingly, not all that encouraging.

He said he'd talked to two speech therapists and an ear-nose-throat doc, and two of them had said, before he even finished describing my problem, that it sounded like I had reflux disease.  Er?!  Apparently, one of the secondary symptoms is this difficulty breathing, and they said in many people, there wasn't the primary symptom of heartburn.  (If you want to know more about reflux disease, look it up yerself.  It's pretty much what you'd expect - failure of a valve in your stomach, allowing acid to injure your esophagus.)  He also mentioned that those glottic structures covering the vocal cords had actually been swollen.  Speech therapy was still recommended but the therapists said it would take a course of at least three weeks of instruction - there's no way to just hand a worksheet to someone, apparently.  And, he added, there are plenty of very good speech therapists in Boston.

Furthermore, there's some danger in just continuing and not addressing the problem.  The tissue can habituate to my breathing patterns - get stuck like this, and take a very long time to stop.

A long conversation later, I had decided the following:  Get the prescription for Protonix, to combat the reflux disease.  Take that for a couple of weeks.  It's supposed to show effects within 10 days, so if I'm not showing any improvement in that time, it's time to start reevaluating.  Head home if no improvement, take a few weeks off to recuperate and learn from the speech therapist and take the anti-anxiety drug.  (He said he would only prescribe the anti-anxiety along with the speech therapy.)  Meanwhile, focus on not breathing with that sharp intake, which causes the wheezing sound which has laymen convinced I have asthma and the doctor worried.  Breathe through nose as much as possible.  Hence, try not to exert myself enough on the road to cause me to breathe through mouth.

We looked up reflux disease and also decided on avoiding lots of foods, which flat-out sucks.  Chocolate, tomatoes, citrus, carbonated beverages, fatty foods.  Lots of others I don't care about anyway, but those are bummers.  It would be nice if I saw immediately confirmation in my condition, by avoiding those foods, because frankly, it does seem kind of far-fetched to me, the whole thing.  I have reflux disease so I can't breathe right?  Okay, whatever.  I'll try.

So we got prescription and lunch and biked to Biddleford (about 11 miles), where my uncle Douglas met us and picked us up.  We could, under ideal circumstances, have biked all the way to Rye - it was probably only another 40 miles? - but it was 98 degrees and we were, as usual, getting a late start, though that was circumstantial in this case.  Soon after Douglas picked us up, actually, we got a whopper of a thunderstorm, so that all worked out nicely anyway.

On the way, biking, we both got overheated and had to stop and pour water over ourselves.  Well, me, anyway - Molly mostly continued to drink hers, which she says is more efficient at cooling the body, though less immediately gratifying.  Darn.  I wondered aloud if our bodies might adapt, become more efficient at releasing heat, as he head into the summer and the (hopefully) long biking stretches.  Other parts of the body adapt, I mean.  Muscles certainly do.  Bones do too - become stronger.  Nerves.  When put under adverse conditions, the body is an amazing thing, making use of what resources are available.  So I wonder, does the integumentary system change too?  Might I sweat more, in the mid-west?

Meanwhile, we've taken a look at the next three days (what I'm anticipating is three days anyway), in New Hampshire, from here on the coast to the northwest, where we rejoin the Adventure Cycling trail, which is all neatly laid out for us on maps with altitude and such.  More on that anon.  I'm hoping the next three days aren't that strenuous.   I'll probably get off and walk whenever it gets too rough, which yes, makes me feel like a wimp, and I'm fighting letting it make me feel like a failure altogether.  But I think it's what I need to do, to survive this, and hopefully the Protonix will start kicking in soon after that.

More, as I've said, hopefully.

And so the Medical Mystery Tour continues.

(Yeah, you know I've been waiting all entry to say that.)
 

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I finally finally get to start an entry by bragging, "We did fifty miles today!"

Okay, 49.04.  You'll forgive me the rounding up, won't you?

And they weren't 49.04 easy miles, either.  No, they weren't, boys and girls.  But I did them, and they are MY 49.04 miles.  Muahahahaha, etc etc.

We left my uncle Douglas's at a very respectable 8:30 a.m. (we won't  mention that somewhere in our obviously-already-sleep-befogged brains, we'd decided we be out by 7:00, the night before, except that we just did mention it, because we have taken truth serum apparently), left again at an almost-as-respectable 8:33 a.m. when we had to turn around to retrieve our trailer flags, and made Pretty Dang Good Time for the first, um, 17 miles I think.

Remind me to tell you about my uncle Douglas sometime.  No, really, I will, just not right now, because tonight we are running off the computer battery and it's a long story to tell.  He's the one who first inspired me to do this trip, though it was entirely unintentional and in fact completely without interacting with me.  He biked across America in 1973.  That wasn't done then.  It's a cool story, but very very unlike what we're doing.  Perhaps if we write a book about this when we're done, I'll tell it all at great length.  Or I'll ask him to tell it all at great length.  Anyway:

So I took my Protonix for the reflux disease (supposed reflux disease.  I really am skeptical, I'm sorry to say; time will tell) and dosed myself on Albuterol for the immediate symptoms, and for a good deal of today I actually got the timing pretty okay.  It was when I didn't that it sucked.

We stopped for brekky at 17 miles (darn. I love the word "brekky" but it's impossible to retain it and say "brunch."  "Brekkyunch" just doesn't cut it) at this neat little place in Newcastle, amongst a gaggle of Cool People (read: hip young college-age types with funky clothes, dredlocks, politics on their sleeves, etc).  French toast stuffed with cream cheese.  Yum.  But after that, I behaved myself eating-wise, to avoid All Them Bad Things That Might Be Exacerbating the Alleged Reflux Disease.

Then it was back on the road, and sadly things weren't quite as delightful after that.  We'd been whizzin' along, taking the hills pretty much with impunity, but I never did quite get that "high" again; frequently I sagged, and sometimes I whimpered my way up the hills with embarrassing slowness.  And yet, sometimes it was the slowness and the need to stop and breathe that made for good moments.  Like when we plunked down atop a hill and Molly noticed that there were wild blueberries growing.  I was charmed.  I hadn't picked wild blueberries since I was about six years old, I love blueberries, and there were juuuuuust enough that were juuuuuuust close enough to ripe that it was fun poking around for them.  Earlier than I would have thought for blueberry season, too.  And it's amazing what you notice, chugging past something at 10 or 12 mph, that you simply do not at 55 or 80.  The wildflowers, some of which are really stunning - lupine, little irises, tons of daisies and lazy susans and various types I can't immediately identify.  Sumac and virginia creeper, poison ivy by the acre.  The patterns of trash - where you'll see beer bottles, how many bits of houses and cars and clothes and gloves (yes, workgloves are the single most common thing I notice in the shoulder) - sometimes I think we could build a house out of all the stuff we pass, if it keeps up at this rate all the way across.  How much you appreciate a wide shoulder.  How the smell of the air changes within a few feet.

I pooped out again on another bad hill - or perhaps it wasn't a bad hill, and I just couldn't handle it anyway - and Molly stopped right in front of a very neat looking house, all pretty shingles and interesting angles and nooks.  We had simultaneously run low on water, so we went up to beg some from the homeowner, and she turned out to be the proprietess of the antique shop there, Wonderful Things.   Elizabeth was fabulously kind to us.  She explained that the area was called "Antique Alley," a row of some 30 or more antique places that people came from all over the world to shop.  She told us about her bike journeys as well, showed us all around the shop and was very glad to talk to us about what she did, the interesting old pieces there, etc.  We saw hatpins and roll-down desks and a really cool grandfather clock from the 1840's with stone weights, keen ice tea spoons and a letter-turner/magnifying glass (used for books that had very thin pages, that you wouldn't want to get your finger oils on, like big old Bibles), little charms and - her specialty - beautiful, beautiful rings.  I'm not into antiques myself, but I often love listening to people talk about things they're good at and really love to do, so I was perfectly happy to ply her with questions about her work and the pieces she liked.  Then she offered us cheese and crackers, which of course we couldn't turn down, and it turned out to be these fabulous Waterford crackers and goat cheese and bananas and apple cider, la de da.

This is what I'd been hoping for, in wanting to do this trip.  Not that I can't get goat cheese perfectly well in Boston, but... well...  I can sometimes have a low opinion of America the Nation, and I'd like to prove myself wrong by meeting many of the really cool people who make it up.  There's something really special about meeting someone and saying, hey, this is this cool thing I'm doing, tell me a little about what you think is cool.  You might meet the same person in a grocery store, but they're doing their thing and you're doing your thing and you buy your raisin bran and your carrots and your pudding mix and you go your separate ways.  America used to be composed of neighbors.  People who grew up next to each other, who'd borrow a cup of sugar from each other, who knew each other's names.  I don't know my neighbors' names, I don't even know who belongs to what car that's parked on my street, and I've lived there for two years!  Well, perhaps I can meet a few of my neighbors now - just ones who happen to live somewhere else.

The ride got pretty hairy for me, from there on.  I hadn't timed the Albuterol very well, and I was having a very difficult time making it up a lot of the hills.  Trying to breathe through my mouth as much as possible, trying not to ever let myself get to the point where I lost my breath entirely - because then it would take several minutes to get it back, even resting.  It was frustrating and sometimes scary.  And I know that if the Protonix doesn't work, well, I can't ride across America dependent on Albuterol.  For starters, it hasn't been prescribed to me, and I likely can't get more.  For another, it's just a bad idea: there's a problem, and it needs to be dealt with, not put off for three months.  And even if I wanted to try and had enough Albuterol at hand, it has diminishing returns - eventually it would last me too short a time to do me much good.  So I rode, and thought, and worried, and wished I knew if the diagnosis was right, and got tired way too easily, and looked out across America at all the people reading this, and waited for the chance to type this one thing:

Stop for a minute.  Sit back in your chair.  Relax.  And take a deep, deep breath.  And let it out.  And do it again.  Think about how that feels, how easy it is, how it fills up your chest, how if you pay close enough attention, you can feel a little bit of a rush through your body.  Mmmm, oxygen.

I'm a massage therapist by trade-and-love, and one of the many, many side benefits of having chosen to make that my life's work is that I come into contact with lots and lots of people who are very stressed out, tired, and in chronic pain.  It's a constant reminder that I'm not, that I can do pretty much what I want, stay up til 3 a.m. reading, go dancing, heck, type out journal entries for hours, and it won't bother me.  But because I encounter all these people who hurt, who have to limit their activities, who are easily fatigued, I don't take it for granted.  I think I'm very lucky, that I treasure my health, and I think many people don't, until (as I frequently hear from my clients) it's declining.  Until they're in their thirties and they can't do things like they used to.  So I'm doing it now, I'm taking advantage of what my body can do while it still can with a modicum of effort.

But I never, never stopped to think about breathing.  Ever.  Until now.

So I'm encouraging you to.  I mean it.  Sit for a little while and treasure the fact that you can breathe.  Easily.  Deeply.  Effortlessly, even.

Because I can't.  At the time in my entire life when I most need to be able to, I can't.

Today was pretty darn cold and rainy - the one bank sign I passed that noted the temperature said 58 degrees, and the one I saw yesterday said 98 - and it kind of spattered and blattered rain on us for much of the day.  So by 4:30, at 50 miles and with no more campgrounds available for another 15 or 20, we decided to call it quits.  But I was glad we'd made it that far, and I ended up having yet another interesting conversation with one of our camping-neighbors, Kay Warren.  She turned out to have a son of 31 who was about as adventurous as I am...squared.  Told me all about his activities, from hiking the Applachian Trail to running the YMCA in Hawaii to leading teenagers on 3-week-long adventure treks, the equivalent of Outward Bound.  Very cool stuff.  We talked of all sorts of other things, too, but one of the most amusing bits of the conversation came when I found out that she'd been brought up in Braintree, MA, same as my mother.  She was two years older than my mother, though, which put her at the same age as my aunt Sandy.  And yes, the name rang a bell.  They'd gone to school together, though Kay didn't remember Sandy closely.

Just one of them things.  The world's a small place, ain't it?   Ya never know where you're going to meet your neighbors...

It was... a good day.

It's an incredibly pleasant night out - not godawful humid, a nice temperature, with the wind soughing in the pines.  I'm greatly a-wearied now and I think I'll actually be getting to bed before 10:00 for the second night in a row.  I'm sleeping a bit better - still waking up four or five times a night, which isn't conducive to terrific rest, but at least my legs don't ache terribly when I do wake, so I get back to sleep in a reasonable amount of time.  This is a Good Thing.

Another Good Thing, and a far more possibly-portentious Good Thing, is that - tentatively, cautiously, afraid-to-hope - my breathing seems to have improved.  Perhaps the Protonix is working.  Perhaps all the dietary changes and the focus on breathing patterns are helping.  Perhaps I'm not going to have to ship home in a few more days.  This is the first I've felt anything but scared about the prospect since the trip began.  I wasn't wheezing my way up the hills.  Granted, the hills were substantially gentler to us to begin with, but we hit some biggies as we went, and there were some loooooooooong slopes - like, 6 or 8 miles slightly uphill without a break.  No, really.  And my breathing seems to be better now, and the Albuterol has long since faded from my system.  So.  We'll see.

In fact, there were plenty of good little things.  Well, except for lunch.  Lunch was one of the most abysmal meals of our lives, I think.  Even the honey-roasted cashews were pathetic; how can you ruin a cashew?  But it made for a hell of a lot of joking.  The road shoulders, for the most part, were pretty broad and well-paved.  The bits where they weren't were pretty ick, but oh well.  And the predicted rain didn't happen.

The predicted campsites didn't happen either, so when we'd intended to go another 8-12 miles, we ended up going another 20.  And lemme tell ya, at the end of a long day of biking, when you've budgetted for another 10 miles in your muscles and you have 10 more beyond that, it can whup ya.  Did me, anyway.  But the end result was that we biked 64 kick-ass miles today.   Sure, that's what we're going to have to do all the time, but it felt really good to have done it today.  It was not flat.  Tomorrow will be hillier - we'll be on the fringes of the White Mountains, and I'm sure it'll get pretty darn difficult at times.  But today was absolutely nothing to sneeze at, and I'm really proud.  Really tired, but proud.  Today made me feel that I could actually do this.  Even the hard bits.  If my breathing keeps improving, I might even be able to laugh at the hard bits.  But that's yet to be seen.