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In which your heroines narrowly escape death by dump truck, and pick their way through some highway interchanges

Another 40-miler today. I would have a more exact idea of that figure, except I had to zero out Cee's odometer halfway through the day.  I had set it to start ticking in Rockport, so that we could watch the miles pass beneath us as we slowly wended our way across the continent. Unfortunately, I forgot to set the time of day, and when I went to rectify that today, it would read only "10:2" and refused to respond to any input. Blarf. So I had to reset the darn thing, and we lost approximately 66 miles. Shame on me.

It is a shame, actually; I love the whole odometer-pride thing.  Mine currently tells the short story of 1300 miles of bike commuting this year, through rain and snow and sun and suckage, and every time I look at that number, it makes me smile. Those are my 1300 miles, belonging to me and my yellow bike and nobody else (nyaah nyaah) and I'd hate to deprive anyone else of that feeling.

However, that's the least of our worries. Cee can tell her story better than I can; basically her breathing is frighteningly bad. She'll go to the Scarborough Health Clinic in the morning and see what turns up.

Today was pretty low key in terms of biking. The hills were much gentler than yesterday. We stopped in Freeport for a nice little lunch, and people admired our trailers. e drafted dump trucks and cruised under the beautiful weather.  Constant route re-routing ended up taking us straight through Portland, where we stopped at my brother Paul's apartment, hoping for a hello and some lemonade. He wasn't home - we did get to speak to Fou the smart drooly cat through the window, who gave us an earful about not coming in to pet him. Dropped a note in Paul's mailbox to say hi, and went on to camp in Scarborough.  Uneventful but nerve-wracking -- we are waiting for Cee's diagnosis.

In which one heroine survives a nasolaryngeal photo expedition, and the other... doesn't.

Today, for me, was defined by large bouts of waiting punctuated by information. I biked 1.5 miles from our "adult only" campground (whatever) to the hotel where we're currently holing up, waiting for tomorrow's appointments. Cee saw a bunch of doctors, one of whom numbed her nose, lubed it up, and then stuck a camera in it to take pictures of her larynx. Meanwhile, I was reading an article on Harry Belafonte in Modern Maturity magazine.  She's going to call up tomorrow to see if she can get an appointment with a speech therapist, who can apparently help her with her laryngeal dyskinesia. Yep - that was the verdict, laryngeal dyskinesia.

I'm also angry at Verio for totally failing to switch my DNS servers over to servers that EXIST so that the people I pointed to this webpage can actually see it. I requested this Friday, again on Sunday, and again today. Soon I will be Bitin' Off Hedz. Yarrrrrrrrr.

I also have gear woes. Gear woe 1: my camera battery is suffering from a critical Failure to Thrive. I charge it all night and it still thinks it is about to run out, even when the indicator light says it's fine.  Hm. Gear woe 2: the cool GPS unit (yay geek toy!) given to me by David's mom seems to have suddenly decided to stop working. No power-on, no lights, no nothing. Even with brand new working batteries. Gear woe 3: I want my new modem so I can dial in with my cell phone!  Though I suppose that last one's just a gear bitch.

Much love,
The Gear Bitch

Where our heroines are blessed with good gear vibes

Today:

• My camera battery decided to start charging up again,
• A nice guy at a bike shop in Scarborough, ME, adjusted my front derailleur for free,
• The Garmin GPS people apologized profusely that my handheld GPS unit (thank you, Carol, for such a cool geek toy) suddenly failed to work, and agreed to replace it, and
• Verio finally got it through their heads, six days late, that I wanted to change my primary DNS.

Tonight we're staying with her uncle Douglas in his gorgeous house in Rye, NH, part of the 16 miles of the Granite State actually bordering the ocean. We are sleeping on an air mattress. I, my friends, am completely failing to rough it here. The only cooking I've gotten to do has been out-of-the-box cuisine. I have taken two taxi rides, slept in three beds, and checked my email every day. My thighs do not hurt. The worst hardship I've endured was a night in a mosquitoey campground. Today, the sky was radiantly beautiful - a shade too radiant at 98 degrees, but clear and gorgeous nonetheless. As soon as we made it inside Douglas's house, the skies opened up a showy torrent of rain, but the weather promises to be stellar again tomorrow.

So, we forge on, undaunted by the completely crazy scary topo outline of northern New Hampshire and Vermont coming up in a few days. I'm sure my baseless bravado will carry me through.

In which our heroines begin to find their grooooove and have some amazing chèvre

Today started out much earlier than many other days, meaning we had time to go almost 50 miles (stopping for a long leisurely lunch and several languid breaks) and make camp by 4:30. This was a welcome change from our previous days of racing the sun to get our 40 miles in by nightfall. Colleen breathed all day, which was a relief to everyone concerned. I feel we are approaching a groove.

It seems that the strangest things are difficult about bike touring. It isn't the biking, exactly; it's the fact that you can't just stop in used book stores along the way to pick up reading material. Shopping for anything besides food seems worse than irrelevant, it seems dangerous and stupid - who on earth would want more stuff? I'm quite certain I have enough stuff as it is. Halfway up large hills, I become possessed with the sweaty certainty that I have far, far too much stuff. I start making mental lists; perhaps I could toss those pans, or my camp sandals, or all my clothing and sleeping gear.  It's funny how every item in my pack has come under intense hill-induced scrutiny except my computer and the Dr. Bronner's soap. 

More road magic today - Elizabeth at Something Wonderful Antiques in Northwood consented not only to give us water, but also to provide us a nice restful stop. We looked around her fabulous store, in the converted barn of a farmhouse, and talked about antiques and her own bike touring experiences. As if that weren't enough, she gave us crackers and cheese -- this amazing, creamy goat cheese that was to die for. Granted, I was probably starved for calories anyway, but this was primo cheese. Yum. Anyway, she took our picture and we toodled on our way. Then we borrowed a blanket for our poor, shivering bodies from a very neighborly woman in an RV next to us. People always ask, "aren't you scared of all the weirdos?" Nope. Not one damn bit. I came out here to see the country, not just the countryside.

In which Colleen has the most terrible sandwich of her life, and Molly has an even worse one.

I was never fully aware of the fantastic array of things one can do to a ham and cheese sub to make it totally inedible.

Today, we hit a town just before lunchtime, and after passing through the semi-lively town center, it occurred to us that we might want to eat at some point, since the next real town wasn't for 20 miles. Sadly, the only place around was a convenience store, but it said "GRINDERS" in big yellow letters on the sign, so I thought, "hey, sure, some convenience stores make yummy sandwiches, right?" That may be true, but this place was one of the most sorry-ass backwater flavorless convenience stores I have ever had the bad karma to stop at. We bought two ham subs that were rock-solid frozen and some honey-roasted cashews. I heated mine up in the microwave and got a limp, warmed bread-and-frozen-ham sandwich with an icy onion-and-old-pickle center. mmmmmmmmmm. That's living. The cashews, however, were the most useless calories I have ever ingested. You know how when you leave foods in a cabinet for too long, all the flavor leaches out until everything tastes like everything else? I call that "cabinet taste". Tastes like Formica and old Grape-Nuts. Well, these cashews, despite being packaged, sealed, and stamped for mass consumption, had quite a case of cabinet taste. It was as if all of the flavor had leached out of them and gone on to annoy something else, like Bac-Os or instant pudding. Something inappropriate and incongruous. In a word: Yeuggggh.

So, fed but not sated, we lurched along down the road. It was a very pleasant day - there were wildflowers and mountain passes and freshwater springs and charming roadside detritus. (We still have not figured out why the world's main method of workglove disposal seems to be out the car window.) Colleen may not brag about the day to you, but she did amazingly well up some great big mean hills and lived to tell the tale. She didn't even strangle me when an error in map-scale estimation compounded with a missing campground meant that we had to go 20 miles after dinner instead of 8. (Uh, oops.) We both will sleep soundly tonight, I imagine - and tomorrow we join the Adventure Cycling route! This makes me wonder how people will react to us once we start along a well-cycled route. Surely these people will have seen long-distance cyclists before. We will no longer be spreading the gospel of trailers and triple chainrings across the land, because suddenly we will be part of a quirky summer fixture in the towns we go through.  Will they like us or resent our weirdness? Maybe it's just because we're so near the Appalachian Trail that I think about this. What does it mean to be a thru-biker? Will we meet other cyclists? Is that even what I want to do?

When I was biking in France, I met an Israeli guy named Alon who had taken his savings, bought a bike and gear, and decided to tour France. We were like polar opposites - I had a hybrid bike with 11 kilos of stuff, including my 7 pound computer, a dictaphone, and a bunch of books. He had a custom made tour rig with ENORMOUS front and rear panniers and camping gear and elephant guns or whatever. He'd even had his wheels made up specially for the trip with tandem spokes so they would be expedition-worthy and carry all of his mounds of things. You could have blown this bike up and then ridden it across the Mojave. All this for toodling around Western Europe, where hostels are thick as blackflies in June and cycle tourism is almost a given. Because of our similar outlook and different approaches, we got along well. We had a good time swapping stories of little towns and scary roads in the area, and spent the night at the house of the woman running the hostel we were staying in. Then he went on to go squash grapes or whatever, with all his gear, and I went on with all my nothing, but something interesting was exchanged. Now, when planning tours, I think about him. I think, wouldn't it be nice to be 100% self-contained like that guy? But, god, wouldn't it be miserable to carry that mobile mountain of possessions up a hill? And I'm sure he felt the same about me - how carefree to be hostel touring, but how much planning did I have to do? And how much money did I spend for that luxury? As an aside, I'm sure he spent more energy biking around than me, because when I met him, he was eating a tub of butter. I kid you not. I mean, sure, dairy products are great in Brittany and all, but the guy was smearing it on crackers like it was Easy-Cheese. Wow.

Anyway, right now I feel a certain happiness what we had a nice long day and we're steadily moving along our route, but I feel like I won't be satisfied until something thoroughly weird happens, something unique to cycling. Maybe I just want to talk to someone about their bike tour, hear about what gear choices they made and how they feel about their shoes at the end of the day.  Maybe I just want to hump over the Whites and get to New York already so we can put this adjustment period behind us.

Ach! Such kvetching! Won't I ever be satisfied, already? Yes, I'm happy, I'm loving this, I'm proud of Cee for persevering through a whole lot of crud with a smile on her face, I love stopping in random breakfast joints in the middle of what I would have thought of as nowhere and having a fabulous meal with cool people. I love talking with other campers about their experiences, and I love how great it feels to get off the bike and just sit at the end of a nice long day. One of these nights, I really want to make a campfire and roast marshmallows - just because. I'm quite sure I'll break out into a rousing chorus of "Kumbaya" or "Black Socks (they never get dirty)" or something.  I love that I'm getting the dorky bike-glove spot tan on the backs of my hands, which I never got cycling to work because it was too early in the morning.  I just wish I felt like I was getting stronger, stronger up hills or quicker to recover. Right now, I kick butt on the flat straightaways, but hills just knock me backward and leave me for dead. Well, a few more days of New England, and then it'll be over for a while. I'm sure that by the time I get to Illinois I'll be crying for some real topography.

and we're off!