Molly's Journal: Week Three

We try to look into the future and fail

Today started with breakfast in Boonville, NY - yes, it exists. While unlocking our bikes, two older gentlemen, one on a bike, one on a neato large adult trike, came over to admire our gear. I started to tell them about the trailers, since most folks have never seen them and want to know what they're like. When the men didn't respond to my spiel, I noticed that they weren't ignoring me, they were signing.  So! I got to try out my sign-language skills, which are very rusty, seeing as how I haven't used them since the age of twelve.  This meant I couldn't tell them about how aerodynamic the trailers were, since I had no idea how to sign "aerodynamic" or even "efficient".  I did manage to get across that they were easy to use and we could go fairly fast, and that we were on a cross-country trip to California that would take us three months.  They seemed pleased that I could even sign at all, and wished us good luck on our journey. The whole exchange made me want to go back and learn lots more sign, so if anyone in the Boston area has any good resources to point me to (classes?), I'd appreciate it. I really wished I'd been able to have a more interesting conversation with these guys.

Basically, the day went downhill from there. The weather stank. The winds stank. The terrain - uphill - stank.  When we got over the weather and the winds, Colleen's knees suddenly manifested this weird, stabbing pain that hobbled her. Get this: she actually biked the last three miles of the day with only one leg, since the other was in horrible pain. But she biked it! How cool is that? I was impressed. It is difficult, though, to be the Morale Brigade when everything really does seem to be falling apart. There is nothing comforting to say, sometimes; the best I can do is to be there, and be as much help as possible. I'd like to do more, but... what is there? I can't make it better.

At any rate, it was clear that Colleen could not continue to bike under those conditions. The breathing, she was conquering. The plantar fasciitis, she had largely under control. I'm not sure she's told you all about her foot problems, but they are unpredictable and prettydebilitating. We were working through the mechanical defects, and the physical strength and endurance she has covered. But sharp, stabbing knee pains for no reason are not something you can work through.  I tried adjusting her shoe cleats, so her feet would be held at a different angle while pedaling. She tried massage and stretching and myofascial release. Nothing helped. So, when we got into camp, we discussed alternate possibilities. Maybe we could re-chart the route to make it shorter. Maybe she could take time out and rejoin. Maybe she could find another quest to go on this summer - she has some good ideas and opportunities.

I hope it works out. I would love to make it from coast-to-coast, but if she can't do it, I'm not sure I'll do it alone. I've traveled alone before, for long periods, and I did find it rewarding. It's just not what I'm looking for right now. And, to be honest, I'm not sure I feel safe biking alone in the US. When I was bike touring alone in France, I felt blissfully safe, like I was drifting on a puffy island of safeness, in a foamy sea of no-problem. I loved it. I have more reservations about America. How sad is that - I don't feel safe alone in my own country. Perhaps I will finish alone - send home the camping gear, pare my load down to a computer, a camera, a change of clothes and a toothbrush, and stay in hotels. I'd be faster, and staying indoors is safer. But such speculation is premature at best -- we'll get Cee a knee brace tomorrow and see how she does. Things change.

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit: Cee and Molly vanquish the headwinds at 5:1 odds

For a day that started with driving through thunderstorms in a pickup truck and ended with cooking dinner over a Whisperlite in gale-force winds, today was startlingly good. We didn't go that far - 40 miles, maybe - but we did it in the most strident wind I've ever biked through. Yesterday's headwinds were depressing.  I felt slow.  Today we were the plucky underdogs charging into battle against the huge, evil army of winds. At  one point, we were both pedaling hard to go downhill at 6.8 miles per hour. For reference, we hit 30 - 35 MPH with some regularity going down hills.  The average leisure biker has a hard time staying balanced at under 5 miles per hour. It was as if I was biking against a hand on my forehead.

I loved it.

This was interesting to me - I dislike hills. I don't hate them, I just find them annoying. I like getting over hills, and feeling as if I've dome something, but the act of climbing a hill is not something I relish. The best part of biking up is biking back down.  Today, against this ridiculous wind I can't even properly describe, I enjoyed every pedal stroke. I had a smile on my face even as the wind was raising goosebumps on my arms. I felt cold and invigorated and I had a certain amount of righteous anger fueling me all day. Every foot covered was a triumph.  Colleen performed miraculously well against this meteorological mountain - her knees seemed to hold up very well and at the end of the day I was relieved to find that she, too, enjoyed the feeling of having conquered this bizarre day. We made camp in a state park, Cee shoring up the tent to withstand this weather, me cooking spicy mushroom-zucchini stir-fry over a teeny little camp stove. There is hope in our little tent tonight.

In which David proves himself to be a better feminist than either of us

I'm not really sure what today was like, because I was thinking about something else at the time. I'm sure there were hills and headwinds and annoying cars, because if there weren't, I probably would have noticed. I spent a lot of the day in a contemplative funk about things beyond the scope of this document.  The only reason I relate this to you at all is because it points out something interesting about how I spend my days - namely, that thinking is usually the last thing on my mind. It doesn't really take a lot of brainpower to push pedals over and over and over. Sure, I have to make some decisions -- should I scoot to the left or the right of this pothole? When should I downshift? Am I OK to reach down and take a drink from my bottle? etc. But really, most of these are so internalized that they don't require any actual processing power from me. They are decided somewhere between my feet and my hands and my lizard-brain. So I'm left with millions of spare cycles, if you will, with no project occupying them.

What do I do with all of this valuable alone time? Well, it goes something like this:

(song)"Black socks, they never get dirty, the longer you wear them, the blacker they get. Some day, I'll probably launder them..." hey, I should probably do laundry. I bet my feet smell. I need new shoelaces. Man, why can't I ever remember to get new shoelaces when I'm in a store? (song)"Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me, do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me..." hey! buttercups! "do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me, look away, hmmm hmmmmmm, hmmhm. Looked up to heaven, and what did I see?" Geez, what did I see? Why do I only get songs stuck in my head that I don't know the words to and haven't heard in 15 years? Why can't I get something like the Smurfs theme song stuck in my head?

(pause.)

Oh, crap. Now I have the Smurfs theme song stuck in my head. La la la-la-la-la, la la la la-la la la la, angel was a centerfold.... gee, thanks, Dan, for pointing out how those songs sound exactly alike. Now I have two dumb la-la songs stuck in my head. Hey, I wonder what day it is. Is it Friday? My gloves smell like fabric softener.

And so on. I imagine you get the idea. I'm not exactly curing cancer here.  Today we added in my favorite license plate game - take the three-letter group from the license plates that pass and make the shortest word you can out of them. For example, take APB. We got palpable and capybara, both decent, and then topped them with aplomb. AUF didn't yield anything better than dandruff, and I don't think we ever found a satisfactory one for CMW. If you have a good one, let me know (no cheating and writing a program to find the word for you).

At any rate, we ended up stopping in Seneca Falls, New York tonight. It took me half the day to figure out why I knew that name. When I did figure it out, I almost yelled to Cee, "hey! It was the Women's Rights Convention thing!" but I figured she already knew and would say, "uh, yeah Molly." Turns out she was mulling the same problem. I called up David after we'd both gone through the realization and said, "Hi! We're in Seneca Falls! Know why that's cool?" Of course, he did. He's so cool.

A boring day, hooray-hooray

As it turns out, I never properly got my rear wheel round again. My front is behaving marvelously, but the rear was still warbly despite my tender ministrations. It seems that it just got dented for one reason or another - it had a "low spot" where it had been pulled in too much. "High spots" seem to be more easily fixable, since you can pull them in, but just releasing the tension on low spots seems to be less effective. So, beaten, and not wanting to pop more spokes out in the boonies, I decided Colleen was right and I should pick up a new rear wheel. We rode over to Geneva (a town with five signs announcing its name within 20 feet of each other) and did our bike-shoply duties and kept on going. There were more hills than we'd expected, but even so:
 

• Nothing broke
• Nothing hurt
• We made it up all the hills
• We made it down all the hills
• We went 50 miles.

for which there will be no byline

This whole journal-keeping thing is a strange exercise in narcissism. Every day, I try to capture my thoughts -- at least, those which are publically palatable -- and jot them down for other people to read. Sure, bike touring is an essentially selfish pursuit, so self-indulgent commentary should naturally follow, right? Not quite. I don't understand how webloggers do it.  Every day, sometimes more than once a day, they have something interesting and pithy to share , or, failing pithy, at least something amusing.  As I mentioned the other day, I think about a lot of very very useless stuff.  I spend most of the day singing weird songs to myself or making wisecracks to Colleen. Sometimes I'll spend an hour playing the license-plate game with a particularly difficult set of letters. Then, at the end of the day, I find that I have nothing to show for my 50 miles but 50 miles.

Today, though, was a cool day in one respect. We are both stronger. We hit a lot of hills today, a whole lot of up-and-down. Much worse than anything we saw during week one. But Colleen charged happily through them all and we didn't walk a single one.  This was a triumph I'd been waiting for. Cee mentioned that when all this was done, she wanted to go back to Maine and do the huge hill by Moody's Diner one more time to see how it felt. I think this is a Good Plan.

Three years ago, I did a solo tour around Brittany in western France while studying Breton language and culture. The focus of my time there was not the biking, but rather all of the other stuff I did. I wasn't very well-prepared and didn't know much about bikes or touring or anything. Early on, I hit an enormous hill that threw me completely off-base. I had to stop three times during the course of my climb, once to sit down and eat a full lunch. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done on a bike.  Later, three days before leaving France, I found myself crossing the bridge just beyond that same hill when I realized that I had just climbed the whole thing without realizing it. No effort, just shoop! up the hill. It was the first time in my life that I remember feeling that I had done something that made my body stronger. I had never really felt physically capable of anything before, and this was a new experience for me. Me! I got stronger! Me, who had to take remedial gym! Me, who couldn't do five situps for the grade-school fitness tests! I achieved something! It was a heady feeling.

No point here - just hooray for finding hidden possibilities.

Roadkill count: eighteen

Ho hum, another 60 miles today. The fun of it is that half of it was after 5 PM. Before that, I blew a tire, so had to change it and then pop by a bike store for more supplies. There's 2 hours down the drain. Then we stopped for dinner and I executed a fantastically untalented parking-lot skid when the pavement leapt up at me. I was jogging across this smooth, well-paved lot to move my bike to a spot closer to our table when suddenly I was on the ground and twelve kinds of bleeding. The nice folks at the restaurant gave me bags of ice and a bottle of peroxide, and I put on all 5 Band-Aids they had sitting around. When we got moving again, the darn things kept flying off in the wind. I tried duct tape, but it was a less-than-optimal solution. Word to the wise: when duct-taping a knee wound, run the tape up and down rather than around the back of the knee. It keeps it on better while biking. I would not have expected this. Pictures coming when I can find my USB cable again. At any rate, it's nice to know that I had my big accident while nowhere near a bike.

Roadkill count was down from yesterday. Yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to count the dead critters.   Some were scary - just hollow eyeless pelts or nameless lumps of fur. Others were just, well, dead critters.  Outer Buffalo suburbs/exurbs don't quite keep their shoulders as neat and prim as other parts of the world seem to.  I wonder if the inner suburbs have less roadkill because they keep the shoulders clean, or because no wildlife lives there?  Roadkill news: yesterday, we saw a just-barely-dead black-footed ferret. Usually, I try not to look at roadkill, but the ferret just grabbed my attention. Anyway, on to a less squicky subject, roads: parts of our journey today were so poorly paved that they should have been labeled "unpaved surface" on the Adventure Cycling maps.  Sheesh.

Tonight: movie and relaxation in hotel beds. Aahhhh. For weeks now, I've been wanting to sit down in a movie theater and just be entertained. It was marvelous. Of course, we had ambitious plans: check maps, buy a new book, revamp the journal-index on the website, but it just boils down to being comfy. And comfy we are.

Hooray!

We leave New York, but sleep in New York anyway

Sorry, New Yorkers, but New York has become a sort of mythical symbol for depressing things on our trip. We are doing better than ever - taking long days, biking long distances and staying pretty healthy despite it all - but we're just not getting enough love from this state. I think we're not meeting each other's needs. It may be time for us to open things up, see other states, have a trial separation. Or just part ways.

Colleen's one goal for the day was to leave New York since it had brought her loads of grief. We did meet many fine, interesting people in New York, including but not limited to a cool woman who ran a shop called the Sugar Shack. They make all kinds of syrups and other delectables from all kinds of berries and fruits. Her free syrup tasting (done with ice cream) was definitely the culinary highlight of my week. Anyway, although we have met many kind people, we will both be very happy to leave it behind forever. So when we decided to camp on the border of Pennsylvania and New York, but just a hair on the New York side, we decided, heck, we HAVE to leave this state today, even if we are forced to come back.  So we made the requisite 40-foot detour, swooped around, and camped for the night.

Tomorrow: Pennsylvania. Then: the world!