Colleen's Journal: Week Four

Notice that we skipped a state.

Okay, so it was kind of intentional.  We wanted to get out of New York yesterday, and the fillip of Pennsylvania that's included on the Adventure Cycling route is only fifty miles long, so we figured we could get through that in a single day too.  Hence, we're now in Ohio.  I think of Ohio as a smallish state, but I know that it'll take a good while to cross, and in fact all of them will from here on out.  Pennsylvania was a fluke.

We're a quarter of the way through the days we've got scheduled for the road, and we're not a quarter of the way across America.  In fact, our schedule will be tighter than that - at least, mine will - because I need to get to Burning Man by about August 25th, and there's most of America to cross between now and then.  We'll have plenty of time to dawdle between northwest Nevada and San Fransisco at the end, but unless we can really, really pick up the pace from here on out, I'll have to skip something in the middle.  That's disappointing, but not really a surprise at this point, and I don't feel like it's a personal failing or anything.

In fact, it strikes me once in a while that no matter what happened now, I wouldn't feel like I had failed at this.  I've put in three weeks of hard work, and I've overcome a good many problems already.  This first hit me one time when I was pushing my bike up a hill, watching Range Rovers sail past, embarrassed that they were seeing me at a moment of weakness.  And then I realized, wait a minute - since when it is weakness to keep plugging, even to the point of getting off and walking so as to keep making progress, when compared to people who are doing nothing more than applying pressure to the gas pedal?  Hmph.  Now that I'm not generally having to get off and walk (I don't think I have in the past three days - granted, the hills are nothing like they used to be; the hills are no longer alive with the sound of gasping), I can evaluate a little more objectively and say, I think I'm doing pretty well.  Even if I don't manage to bike every single mile across America, I'll have biked a few thousand, which is more than most people accomplish.

Here's something that's really continued to surprise me: we see no other Adventure Cyclists on this route.  We've literally encountered two - what we assume were; they were heading the other way and it was the Day of Legendary Winds, so there was no way to even shout across and ask.  We see a few other cyclists, and we exchange friendly nods with most (and laugh at the trick-riders who try to impress us), but they don't look like they're on long trips.  Just locals out for a ride.  Which, of course, I approve of, but which has made me wonder, just who uses these great little maps?  So I queried of Molly today, and she explained that the cross-country touring industry is in fact very, very small.  A few hundred people a year.

Oh.

We've heard so many stories about other people doing this, I just kind of figured that oh, everyone bikes across America.  It's kind of come to feel like no big deal to me, in ways.  It's just what I happen to be doing with my summer.  Sure, it's fun and it's interesting and I like what I'm doing, I like meeting people and seeing the country up close and real personal-like, I like observing the changes in my body and omnisciently and self-reflexively noticing what it is that I notice.  But it doesn't feel like anything particularly odd to me, any more than writing movie scripts or running a massage business or yadda yadda whatever else it is that I do.  It's just my life and the way I choose to live it.

So it comes as a pleasant surprise whenever anyone is truly astonished by the notion.  Like today, we were just heading down Route 5.  We'd been told before that there was going to be a bridge out and how to take a shortcut on the official detour, which we did.  Then we came to a second bridge out, and decided, rather than take the detour, chance it on finding a way across for bikers.  (We've done this a couple of times before, where the road is closed but we can sneak or manhandle the bikes over the barricade.)  This time, no such luck - big ditch where bridge used to be.  We meandered off onto a side street, still hoping not to have to backtrack and take the detour, and ended up in this neat earthy-crunchy camp, where the director answered that yes, there was a route back to the main road, just go on this little grass path through the woods...  Well, we set off on that, but before we got far, the yard crew for the place all clustered around and asked us what seem to have become the traditional twenty questions - where you going, where'd you start from, how long you taking, do you camp out, and what's with these little tiny pedals you've got?  (For my clip-on shoes.)  They were truly amazed, and made me feel as I rarely do, that this actually is a very special undertaking and I should be proud of accomplishing whatever it is I manage.  One of them announced that if he owned a restaurant, he would have treated us to a meal, and then followed it up by digging out what was likely his lunch money and insisting we take it.  I was really touched by that.  Little kindnesses, like everything else on this trip, are really magnified by the circumstance that we are much beholden to strangers, just as we are at the mercy of pre-existing conditions.

So we did end up taking the little path through the woods - if you've ever gone to summer camp, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  It wasn't a bike path at all, so we couldn't really ride on it, but it felt keen and adventurous, and yes, reminiscent, to be wending our way through this little sylvan detour.  We probably didn't gain any time at all, but we had a much more enjoyable route.

Pennsylvania, I'd like to add, seems much closer to Vermont in attitude than it does to New York.  We only had a little slice of it, a day's worth, but the people were nice, the food was good, and the roads were excellent.  I take that back: the roads were often in need of repair, but the shoulders were excellent.  Very odd.  First time I've ever seen that, and ironic after yesterday's little diatribe about the lack of upkeep of the shoulders.  But it held true most of the way across PA, that the shoulders were fairly broad and in very good shape.  I liked Erie, too.  Interestingly, I think it's the largest city we've passed through thus far, at just over 100,000 people.  It had its share of interesting buildings, sure, and we were successfully guided to a bookstore downtown to pick up another selection (David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, in case you're curious; the last was Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction).  But what stood out to me most about the city was that there was this strange dichotomy, most evident in its outskirts: lots of churches and church-related institutions and activities (day cares, camps, cemetaries), and lots of pubs, taverns, and strip joints.  I wonder if there's a history to Erie, from a hundred years ago, of a rough-drinking sort of town, which  prompted some save-'em-from-the-devil crusades...?

Anyway, yes, Pennsylvania was nice.  Ohio, for the five miles we've seen of it thus far, hasn't impressed me - the shoulder instantly disappeared when we crossed the state boundary, hence we were riding up against the curb in the right hand lane, which prompted a couple of people to honk at us within the first mile - which is so what I don't need when biking into a driving rain, which had just started up.  Yug.

Oh, and one other thing about PA.  Where I was brought up, in Alabama, there was animal-control by the gov't.  I don't know the details, but I do know that if there was a dead cat on the street outside your house, you could call up and they'd come remove it.  There doesn't seem to be any such thing anywhere thus far on our trip, hence we see a lot of roadkill, and today the inevitable happened: we started counting.  Even worse, today we crossed an entire state, in exactly fifty miles, so we could count up how many dead animals we passed during that time and come up with a ratio of dead animals per mile.  I'm sure you'll all be thrilled to know that we spotted seventy deceased critters, for a total of 1.4 animals per mile.  Ta-da.

Rest day.  Much deserved rest day, come to think of it.

I'd been resisting such a thing, because I have this big ole guilt complex about the fact that it was my health problems and slow start that have put us behind of where we'd expected and hoped to be.  "No, it's fine," I'd tell Molly, "I can keep going."  Two days ago, we had a short day, which I thought would serve as a rest day.  But yesterday I was sluggish, kept having to stop frequently for stretch breaks and downtime, and today I woke up feeling like proverbial crud.  A huge full-blown cold, which had just been tiptoeing in yesterday, and my leg muscles very sore, plus a new and interesting problem: my left deltoid has really seized up, making it quite painful to keep my arm extended, i.e. to hold the handlebars.  I rode much of yesterday with my arm drooping or even held behind my back, to alleviate the pressure on the nerve and relax the muscle.  Needless to say, not fun.

So I groaned a bit and Molly again suggested that we take a day off, and this time I acquiesced.  "But what will we do?" I whimpered.  What in the world will we do with an entire day not biking, and nothing much to do in Nowheresville on a Sunday?

Duh.

I spent a very relaxed day recuperating, catching up on email, letters, finances, massaging my legs while Molly read to me, enjoying a little outing to across the highway for groceries.  We got an Ohio map and recharted our route somewhat, taking us southwest across the state so as to save a bit more time.  I guess we're ditching Adventure Cycling entirely until St. Louis.  It was a much needed day off, a very pleasant one, and I hardly even felt guilty.

Whooeeeeeeeeee!  Dig them adventurin' heroines!  Watch 'em go!

The day of rest must have worked, because we were up and out by 8 a.m. and covered 75 miles today.  Seh-vun-tee-faivh.  Mmmhmmm.

Okay, okay, I'm sure some of you ride seventy-five miles before lunch.  I'm sure some of you ride seventy-five miles in your sleep.  You chew them up and spit them out, thinking them flavorless and mundane.  But for ME, that's a heckuva lotta miles.  The last time I rode that many, it was on an AIDS Ride in Florida.  See also: flat.  See also: sans 45-pound trailer.  See also: with people giving me juice and energy bars every fifteen miles and crowds by cheering for me.  It's quite different.  This was just me and Molly, plugging away.

And yeah, kids, it was nice.  It was a really nice day.  No big worries, no obstacles, no breakdowns, no body malfunctions.  Well, okay, I'm getting a rash from the darn neoprene knee braces and Molly and I are both a bit sick, but we still managed fine.  The first seventy miles were really nice, gentle hills - I don't even think they deserve that name; "rolls" maybe.  Babies.  Like nuthin'.  Didn't even notice 'em.  The weather was a bit warm, but, um, it's summer.  We're gonna hafta deal with that.  (And I actually deal fine with it, myself.  Molly has more of a hard time, but heat very rarely bothers me at all.)  The roads were pretty "eh.", admittedly - no more than a foot or two of shoulder, and the entire road condition was really shoddy for the most part.  But the people were really nice to us.  I'd been told Midwesterners were nice; glad to have personal confirmation.

What happened today?  Not a whole heck of a lot.  We played Road Kill Body Count again, and I'm sorry to say, Pennsylvania has already had to concede the title in a crashing defeat.  One hundred thirty-eight critters in seventy-five miles.  I also amused myself with running a little Harper's Index in my head.  "Detritus most encountered: beer cans.  Most frequent article of clothing: work gloves."  (Hands down.  No pun intended.  There are an amazing number of work gloves.)  And of course, there's always license plate tag; tell me if you come up with something brilliant for "PBP."  We had a lot of fun, and there were lots of imaginative uses of the letters, like "pot bellied pig" and "post-bipolar," but nothing really valid.  I dealt with my aching deltoid with massage, tiger balm, ibuprofen, and finally, by snagging a bandana from the shoulder and having Molly tie it tightly around the offending muscle.

Here's a weird thing: I'm learning to interpret signals from my body differently.  One way is hunger.  I almost never feel "hungry" in the classic way, the normal signals you receive that demand you put food in your body, and yet I'm learning to understand when my body wants food, when to give it more food, what kinds of food it wants.  It's strange, and I don't think I can explain well; I think it's that I'm developing an intuition about myself.  I saw the bandana and immediately wanted it tied around my arm.  Did I have any previous experience in such things?  No.  Had I ever seen a brace or heard of one that worked in such a way?  No.  But I said, gimme, and it worked.  The pain significantly diminished.

The most exciting stuff about the day came at the end.  It was pretty amazing, actually.  We were coasting along, going, "only five more miles to Hiram," when BAM! there was this wall in front of us.  Now, hills at a distance of a mile or so always look like a wall.  You get used to it.  You shake off the dismay and keep plugging and when you're at the foot of it, you realize, oh, it's not so bad.  But this one really was a wall.  We were at the bottom of it and it just wasn't going anywhere.  We hadn't encountered anything that steep since Vermont.  Consequently and unexpectedly, I found myself walking again.  (This being the end of my seventy-five mile day, I didn't feel particularly ashamed.)

The exciting bit, though, was that we are now in Amish country.  We'd seen plenty of signs of this far earlier in the day, but we thought we'd passed it by.  I don't know how much you know about the Amish, but you're probably aware that they eschew the advances of civilization, living without electricity, rap music, cynicicm, crême brûlée, and the more advanced techniques taught in the Kama Sutra.  Or whatever.  Anyway, they still drive horse-and-buggies, and we encountered our very first one when headed up The Wall.  It made me feel a little better that the horse was barely moving faster than us (and was straining to do so, veins popping out, teeth bared forward - looked pretty unpleasant).  We caught up with the buggy a couple of hills later, though, and I felt smug on my iron horse.  But then we hit some more impressively big hills, which continued for the remaining five miles to Hiram, and we had a traffic jam with the horse-and-buggy.  Right as an eighteen-wheeler was trying to pass, on a tiny two-lane road.  Oh, my.  It got ticklish, especially right as I tried to pass the horse on the right and he dodged towards me.  Scary.  We survived, though, and made our way to Glorious Hospitality in Hiram.

Our hosts tonight are the Haveners.  Their house isn't a B&B, but it very well could be; it's fabulous and they've shown us every kindness.  We heard of them through a great organization called the Touring Cyclists' Hospitality Directory; all the members open their homes to each other, basically, offering a bed and shower whenever possible.  We called them a the last minute this morning, and they were very kind to take us in and swap some tales of adventure with us.  I have to say, I wish we could do this every night - stay in a bed, but without paying forty or sixty or eighty dollars, and stay with people who empathize with what we're doing and don't ask us the exact same questions everyone does.  I hope we can utilize the network more in the future, and I hope I get to return the favor someday, should wayward and weary itinerants come asking for a bed in my house.

Okay, I'm charmed.  I'm apparently misplacedly charmed, because this isn't the Winesburg, Ohio of which Anderson wrote; there are, I'm told, two.  But I'm still charmed, because I'm an English major and we're easily charmed and besides, it's a charming area.  We are now, to my surprise, in the midst of the world's largest Amish population.  Betcha thought it was Lancaster, PA.  Betcha thought that your intrepid heroine would be knowledgeable about such things, too.  Wrong on both counts: the Amish kinda got forced out by rising property taxes.  They had to sell their farms and move en masse, it seems.  So now this is the largest.  I can believe it, given the number of buggies we passed (or that passed us), clotheslines with dark blue clothes hanging out, etc.  I'd be charmed witless if it weren't for the fact that it comes complete with big ole hills, which are not exactly what one wants to be ending one's day with.  Nevertheless, charmed.

So what shall I blather about? - other than being charmed as close to witless as you want to witness, anyway.  Well, thoughts on pioneers.  Thoughts on cars and traffic.  Thoughts on people.

It's pretty hard to be biking across the country, and in particular biking through countryside with both horse-and-buggies and lots of trains, and not think about Those Who Went Before.  We set aside three months to do this trip, and while that seems like a lot of time, we are actually covering some 4000 miles during that time, if all goes well.  How long, though, would it have taken someone in a conestoga?  With some horses or a brace of oxen pulling the cart?  Going across fields, up mountains, forging a way through forests, fording rivers?  You think about it, it could take all day to ford a river.  Get your entire worldly possessions across it.  And this is nothing to say of the inherent dangers - hostile aboriginals (all stereotypes aside, some natives didn't care for the settlers tramping through), animals, inclement weather, the need for food.  Molly and I carry enough food for some snacks and some emergency rations with us, peanut butter, graham crackers, apples, that sort of thing.  But to have to carry big barrels of flour, meal, dried meat...  They couldn't just stop at Ye Olde Mini-Mart and pick up some beef jerky, camp out, make a phone call for roadside service.  I joke about circling the wagons when we bring our bikes together at night, but it was sometimes a life-or-death matter for the settlers.  And this is how they crossed the country.  Granted, they didn't generally do all 4000 miles of it - they were just headed Further West, where they could get a plot of land or maybe have a shot at gold or furs.  But how long would it take to go several hundred miles?  How many miles a day could oxen drag a covered wagon?  I've seen a horse pulling a buggy up one of these hills, straining so hard it looks cruel (though I tell myself it must not be, it's the Amish's horse), and that's just a little cart with a couple of people in it.  Nuthin'.

It really makes you think.  It gives you more respect for the people who forged out here.  I've already heard umpteen stories about modern-day adventurers, people who've planned and done far more than I intend, with this traipse across America - walking around the world, biking half a dozen nations, making this trip when entering old age.  I mean, Granny D, for pete's sake!  But this is something else.  Here, there are stark (if charming) reminders of how things used to be done.  And the trains are another - one I really like, to know that they're still running.  How long did it first take to cross the country by train?  How long by wagon?  How brave would you have to be, to go out into the wilderness and try to hew out a life?  It makes me think afresh about our ancestors, and gives me new respect for the common, everyday, un-remarked-upon guts of the people who first created what we've built on.

Today was another long day - sixty-eight miles, which is nothing to sneeze at, but especially not when it concludes like this did, with lots more big big hills.  The kind we had left behind a little while ago.  Gee whillikers.  We were hoping to make it another twelve or so, but we mutually conked out - Molly being sick and me still getting my sea-legs under me, as it were.  As usual, our luck finding a place to stay held, and we conked out a few hundred feet from a campground.

The day proved to me both that I am getting stronger and, conversely, that I do still have limits.  I didn't know that I could do two long days in a row, and yet as of this writing, we plan on another tomorrow, the longest yet.  There are plenty of signals that my body is still absorbing this - like a four-year-old with her head cocked to the side and a studiously perplexed expression on her face, trying to make sense of it, gradually getting the hang of it.  I just did the second-to-longest day we've done, and it didn't particularly phase me.  When I looked at my odometer to see it flashing something like 38 miles, I thought, "Oh, halfway there" instead of "only 12 more miles to go before we can legitimately call it a day," which I would have done a few days ago.  I recover quicker from big hills; my heart rate goes back towards normal in a far quicker period of time.  My legs are rarely sore during the day (though I can't say the same for my butt).  I feel playful and dorky, rather than scared and tired, the majority of the time.  Enough so that I notice it when I'm scared and tired.

Tired came at the end.  Scared came during the middle of the day, as we wended through Canton.  Ohioans have continued to live up to their rep, except in and around Canton.  What gives?  It's not that big a city, so I can't think it's just a Big City thing.  But people were definitely and dangerously rude to us there, including going out of their way to screw with us.  I don't know which is worse to think of them, that they're that goddam stupid as to honk and swerve at us, when we're in a tense situation that requires all our attention, or that they're actually malicious.  We had at least one example of incredible maliciousness, when biking on a divided highway.  We stay in the shoulder , unless we have to cross an exit lane, and of course we try to stay over to the right then until we come to the place where the exit lane peels off and a new shoulder forms to the left of it.  I'd checked behind me, there was nothing except one guy well back in the right hand lane, i.e. going to exit, so I headed across, with Molly behind.  Shortly thereafter, I hear wild squeals of tires, as of someone braking dangerously quickly - it's the guy, right behind us, screeching around.  The only way he could have been in the position he was in was to pull over two lanes to the left and then swerve back towards the right at the last moment.

If y'all ever see someone screwing with a cyclist, please, shoot them.  It's the only way the cyclist has a chance of coming out ahead in the equation.

It makes me bitter and angry, that someone will honk at me when 1) I am biking completely legally, 2) I am in the shoulder, sometimes many feet from them, and therefore not interacting with their car in any way at all, 3) it's a dangerous traffic situation, such as raining (which it was during all of the above - hard), construction and rerouting (ditto, we dealt with), and/or 4) there's absolutely nothing I can do, nowhere else I can be but right where I am.  There are celebratory and encouraging honks, and we get plenty of those; they're most easily recognizeable because they come after the car has passed us and are light taps on the horn, obviously attempting not to startle us.  But to honk near me, startling me, when I'm locked into my pedals and dealing with detritus, potholes, detour signs, and rain so hard it stings - there just aren't words for that inconsideration.

Aside from that and the heat, it was a pretty pleasant day.  I got bored of just Road Kill Body Count and so started an additional reel in my head: in 68 miles, I saw 140 critter corpses and 29 gloves.  Yep.  It really makes you wonder - is there some connection?  Maybe the gloves are some kind of pupate form of roadkill.  Maybe people throw their gloves at animals so as to stun them.  Or the animals are heedlessly and tragically attracted to the gloves and throw themselves at passing cars in the hopes of obtaining one.  Maybe people take pity on poor freezing animals and toss them the one article of clothing they can remove quickly.  Yeah yeah, or maybe road workers are just clutzy and both lose their gloves and hit animals.  Whatever.  Tomorrow I start a count of those black heavy-duty rubber bungee cords...

Ahem.  Greater Columbus.  We'll elide over the fact that we were carried from One Part of greater Columbus to Another Part Much Farther On, because it's all Columbus, right?  And we biked seventy-five miles again today.  This being after the two longest days of our trip, and on top of that, this being seventy-five miles primarily composed of really darn substantial hills.  Contrary to what we were told, and therefore contrary to what we'd prepared ourselves for.

Let me insert something really essential here, for the legions of you planning your own cross-country bike trips: Never Trust the Locals.  Except regarding food: they can tell you where there's food.  But distances, road conditions, topography... peh.  Never.  No, really: never.  This was a perfect example: we asked what the road was going to be like, and were told by someone who could relate (presumably reliably) all sorts of facts about the local Amish, restaurants, etc, that there would be two horrendous hills in the next seven miles (between Winesburg and Berlin), and then some milder curves and hills for about ten miles, and then nuthin' much to Columbus.

Eeeeehhhht.  Thank you for playing.

We had about fifty-five or sixty miles of hills, the like of which we might have legitimately expected to find in, say, the Adirondacks or the Green Mountains, and which really thoroughly whipped our butts.  It was quite discouraging, and after awhile, there's really little you can do but mutter bitterly, "Great Plains, my aching pasty-white butt."  We had tired of the road kill game (it loses its savor when you spot animals that you really, really don't want to see as roadkill, such as kittens, or when you realize that it's going to mount into the several hundreds by the end of the day), there was a pitiable dearth of gloves and other interesting objects to count, it became fairly hot, and there was really very little to do, to amuse ourselves.  Just ups and downs, soybeans and corn, Amish horse-and-buggy spoor and Mack trucks.  It wasn't fun.

Just in case y'all wondered, it's not always fun.  Sometimes it's just work.  At the end, I like assuming the high and lofty philosophical position of considering what I'm learning and gaining from the work, and I'm sure I'll deliver some of my brilliant and pithy observations at some point, but for the record, I'd just like y'all to know, biking seventy-five miles is still hard work.

The day turned around in Martinsburg, at which point we realized we only had about twenty miles to go until we could call it a day (when we'd arrive in Johnstown, where we would call for a pickup), were suddenly amused by a passle of, well, amusing things, and thereafter had a relatively easy road.  In Martinsburg, life suddenly got funny and dumb, as it is wont to do.  We saw a girl with "Budweiser" written on the butt of her shorts, which gave rise to my comment about how appropriate I found the placement of that slogan; a big truck pulled up which really had the word "Putzmeister" written in large letters across it; and we saw one of those bizarre confluences which make up the big ole patchwork quilt of America, i.e., a Harley-Davidson pulling up behind an Amish horse-and-buggy.

And this reminded me of why I'm making this trip.  One of the whys, anyway.  Some day I'll get around to listing many of them, other than the fact that, as one of my friends has assured me today, I'm a loon.  But right now, I'll just let you in on one of them, and that's that in Boston, I will never, ever see a Harley-Davidson pulling up behind an Amish horse-and-buggy.  I love Boston dearly.  I see many wonderful things there.  But never Harley-Davidson-horse-and-buggies.

I wish I felt like telling you in great detail right now what it's really like, doing this.  What we're passing and how it affects us.  How we watch the countryside change.  How we experience the people changing.  How the subtle kindnesses impact us and accumulate and can really make our day.  What seems to matter to us, day by day, because of where we are and what we're doing.  Maybe by the end I'll be able to say this in a way that it really gets through to you; maybe it's not something I'll ever be able to write about.  At any rate, I don't feel up to attempting it yet, and it's really something I think you deserve to know.  You're wading through all these minor observations, the minutiae of my day, this girl who just happens to be wending her way via pedal-power across this nation, and hopefully you're gleaning some knowledge or inspiration or at least momentary amusement from the whole thing, but I hope I can offer you something larger by the end.  I know it's beginning to amount to that for me.

Other than the big hills of most of the day and Martinsburg, there were two other things that stood out.  One of them was the beginning of the trip - Winesburg and Berlin.  I mentioned I was charmed yesterday, just by the fact that we were in Winesburg, because it's the title of a book that I actually never had to read in my English Lit classes.  But today well-nigh charmed the pants off me, and not because I could polish my knuckles over the reference.  It was the whole area.  It's really hard to refer to the place without using adjectives like "quaint" and "lovely" and "timeless."  Yeesh.  I mean, aside from the buggies, and the haystacks (I'm not talking about those enormous round bales of hay you normally see - I mean something stacked together by hand), and all the Yoder's and Yutzy's wood carving shoppes, and such, the whole area is just darn beautiful.  It's all gorgeous landscapes and vistas and farms, sweet little stores and the sweet people who frequent them.  Mickey D's and gas stations are banished to the outskirts of town.  I've seen touristy places before, and yeah, okay, this was obviously charming for the benefit of the people who came to be charmed, but at the same time, there was a kind of peace, a little-town pace of life, an unhurried quality that I just don't think you can manufacture and market.  It was the first place I've been to since Vermont that made me go, I want to come back here.  By car, granted, but this is a place I want to be again.

The other was towards the end of the day, after Martinsburg.  We ran into our first other journeying cyclists!  Just crossed paths, immediately plopped down and exchanged stories.  Their names were Gavin and Travis, and their trip was unlike ours in almost every way except that they were a) cycling and b) cycling a long way.  They had thrown it together in a month beforehand, were living off fifteen bucks a day, had only one map.  They couldn't afford to get even panniers, let alone BOB trailers, so they were wearing backpacks, which is not a fun way to bike.  They were biking Kentucky to Montreal. They had never heard of the Adventure Cycling trails.  They were definitely not keeping a website of the trip.  But they were cross-country cyclists, in a way, and the fact that we all automatically slammed together to talk about what we were doing and could ask each other more questions than "where you going, where you from, how long you taking," was just a huge jolt.  I don't know if the Powerade might have contributed, but I'm sure that the majority of the power surge I felt for the last fifteen miles was due to meeting these guys.  It's a very different feeling, sharing an experience instead of just talking at an audience, performing, in a sense, being the center of attention.

Speaking of which, one last thing.  Last night in Winesburg was our first time really having an audience.  It was unlike anything we'd had before - we had a crowd.  A big semicircle of people gathering around, quizzing us.  People would wander by to find out what the attraction was and be sucked in, to hear whispered from the previous attendees, those In The Know, what the story was.  The usual questions, of course, and the usual many wishes for luck, good weather, and, most importantly it seems, nice people.  You'd be surprised how many people ask whether we fear for our safety.  Are you not afraid?  Two girls?  There are a lot of crazies in the world, you know.

Yeah, we know.  But guys, there are a hell of a lot of nice people in it, too.  We've had a lot of problems in our first few weeks, but they haven't been with other people.  Health problems.  Gear problems.  Terrain problems.  But not people problems.  People have generally been the solutions.  In case I don't say it often enough, I want to state it really boringly bluntly, at least once: I would not be able to make this trip if it weren't for the constant kindnesses shown us already, the number of people who have gone out of their way to help us, the times we've been up a creek and someone miraculously pulled a paddle out of thin air and said, hey, let me row for a while.  People have been making this trip worthwhile at the darkest moments, when I've feared that it just couldn't happen.  Molly, of course, is a huge, huge part of that, taking up the first, like, nine spaces in the All Time Scorers or whatever, but there have been more people than I can number already, who've contributed to my health, wellbeing, and appreciation of this experience.  So for everybody who wonders, do I not fear for my safety?  Honestly, I think I fear more that I won't be able to pass on all the good done to and for me on this trip.

Heehee.

So today was the scheduled rest day.  The one several days ago was the I-feel-like-utter-crap-and-can't-function rest day.  But today we got to spend hanging out with and being ferried around by my friends Mark and Michelle.  (They had picked us up yesterday in Johnstown and brought us to their house, which I failed to make explicit then.)

Mark was actually the impetus for this entire trip, by the way.  He wrote me an extremely cool email back in December which made me go, "Damn.  When am I going to see him again?"  It was then that I decided that if I didn't make an effort to, well, the friendship would just quietly wilt away, as long-distance friendships often do, which is unacceptable in my worldview.  So I decided to go cross-country to Burning Man, and when I mentioned this idea to Molly, that's when she said, "Biking or driving?"  Like you'd say, "Baked potato or fries with that?"  So here I am, lo these seven months later, and I've biked over a thousand miles to visit Mark and Michelle.  So.  Just so y'all know how things start.

Anyway, it's a rest day for me so it's a rest day for you too.  Go read something less strenuous.  Like the funnies page.