Molly's Journal: Week Six

Homeward bound

Never in my life has it taken me seven hours to drive from Boston to Bangor, ME -- especially not in the summertime, when snow isn't a consideration even in this northern clime.  While going from Bloomington to Maine, I had the pleasure of waking up at 5:30 AM to start traveling and finally taking my foot off the gas pedal at 9:15 PM. But I made it - David and I successfully escaped construction and rush-hour traffic to spend the weekend with my brothers Rob and Paul, sister-in-law Diane, uncle Waverly, and Diane's parents John and Sandy.  I wish I'd had more time there. I've probably seen more of my brothers over this past tumultuous year than I had in the previous three years combined. But all that is another story, and one I won't be able to properly tell without a bit more perspective than I have now. So for the purposes of this journal, I had a sad but good weekend characterized by lots of physical rest and a good deal of hanging out with family. I got a free first-class upgrade flying out of Boston, and starting tomorrow, will be biking trailerless with Colleen and her father, while her mother drives the sag wagon and readies lunch for the weary travelers. And the open road awaits!

insert witty saying here

For the first day back from three days of rest, and for a day spent traveling through hog farms and 100-degree sticky weather, today was remarkably pleasant. Colleen's parents are with us for a couple of days - her mother is driving around, bringing us water and fixing picnic lunches, while her dad is biking along with us. All of this is sans trailers, which are being schlepped around by Colleen's mother.

Which leads me to a question for our overly erudite audience. Can you think of a one-syllable word longer than "schlepped"? David and Paul and I lost a lot of time this weekend making a list of the longest one-syllable words we could think of.  We eventually scraped up ten or so nine-letter entries, but they all begin with "s". We are convinced that there must be either a ten-letter one-syllable word OR a nine-letter one-syllable word beginning with another letter. We've already outlawed "squirrelled", so don't try it.

Other news (today's a slow one): I've got my USB cable back now, so I'm putting up new pictures. Check 'em out!

Yes, it IS hot enough for us, but thanks for asking anyway

Oh my land, it was hot today. It was a heat to melt the rivets right out of your jeans. That is, if you happened to be wearing jeans, which no sane person would have done on a day such as today. When people see us biking in weather like this (perhaps "lurching along" is a more appropriate verb choice) they always seem to ask, "Hot enough for ya?" Those that do not ask this question instead say, "Gosh, you sure picked a hot one for biking today." Usually I like to say, "no, thanks, it picked me," but it's slowly dawning on me that that doesn't really make much sense. Oh well. The funny thing is, I'm so useless in the heat that I would never go biking on a day like today VOLUNTARILY. So I do feel like it picked me -- I woke up this morning, planning to bike, and then the day decided to get hot all over me. The nerve.

We were also biking on a very out-of-the-way stretch of road in Illinois. Places that could give us water or ice were 10 to 15 miles apart, and this was a day that would turn ice into warm water in less than 20 minutes. Thankfully, Colleen's mom was playing sag wagon, and was running around to get us ice and cool water and scouting out the ice-cream options down the road. The day's journey would have been completely impossible without this service. (Blugh. Did I mention the heat?)

Today Colleen was a bag full of ills. She called the day's travels more "pain management" than "biking". As such, she wasn't feeling particularly chattery, so I spent the day more or less alone with my thoughts for long stretches of road. Corn and soybean fields don't make for very engaging scenery after you've been with them for weeks. In a way, I got a taste of what this would have been like without her - i.e., completely dull. I've traveled alone before, and I definitely enjoy it. I enjoy being my own only guide - I'm never hesitant about taking weird detours or stopping for a roadside nap, because I have nobody to answer to but myself. When biking alone in Brittany, I had no watch, no way to tell time at all, for several weeks. This was until I met a hostel that closed its doors five minutes after I showed up - then I reluctantly bought a timepiece to ensure that I would have a bed at the end of the evening. But, all in all, very carefree. After all, what use is time? I had nowhere to be. My agenda was to tool around and chat with people. Who needs time? Sleep when you need sleep, go where your butt takes you. Worked for me.

This trip is very different in some subtle, unplaceable ways. We have Goals. We have dates and set points and miles to go before we eat. We have a continent to cross, and it's not getting any smaller. I have a weird machismo guilt about the cross-country thing. It may be that we don't pedal every inch between East Coast and West, but I'm not going down without a struggle. In no way is this a struggle against Colleen. Rather, we're struggling together to do everything possible to haul our power-patooties out to Burning Man. And for Colleen, this is the point of the exercise. For me, there's a little more wrapped up in the physical aspect of pushing my limits. It may be that she gets a ride from Salt Lake City while I try my hand (thigh?) at a lonesome speed-stretch, showing up a bit late.  Time will tell.

Back to the loneliness, though - I don't think that the fundamental experience of this trip would be at all the same without Colleen.  She's a great traveling companion - gregarious and cool, and she laughs at my near-constant stream of stupid jokes - but it goes beyond that. Before setting out, I had the idea that we wouldn't meet as many people as I had on my own. After all, we'd be traveling together and probably just talking with each other most of the time, right? That's how car travel works. You take a little piece of your world (the car) and move it around from place to place, so that you can Experience the World from within your own space. Don't get me wrong. Cars are wonderful instantaneous transportation devices that roll over hills like nobody's business. Cars are magical beasts of burden that don't care if you have a case of lead in the back seat and a body in the trunk - you just push the pedal and they go. You can see a lot in a car. But the reality of this trip has been different. We meet wonderful, hospitable, interesting, funny people all the time. It doesn't matter whether it's because they're bikers, or because we're two women, or because of our trailers, or Colleen's hair or my knee wounds or whatever. We seem to meet them as a traveling duo, each of us bringing something different to the table. If I were suddenly to take a stretch of this alone, I'm not sure how the gestalt of the journey would change. I think it would be much more about the biking. The getting up and spending all day pushing my limits, only to fall into bed that night and start over again the next day.

Colleen ended up having so many problems today and getting so wearied by the nastiness of the day that she got a ride with her mother for the last nine or ten miles of the trip. Her father and I rode that last bit together, and just for fun, I stepped the pace up a few notches to see what the old engine was capable of. It was interesting - as if I suddenly didn't have time for my mind to wander and get dumb songs stuck in it, because I was Too Busy Biking. Definitely an interesting feeling. Would I want to do that every day for two months? I'm not sure...

"Miles from nowhere, guess I'll take my time to reach there..." --Cat Stevens

New State! Woooo!

So far, I'm impressed with the consistent eight- or ten-foot-wide shoulders in Missouri. I only wish they were all paved. Some stretches will be smooth, perfectly maintained rocks and gravel (euuugh), some will be a lattice of potholes, puddles, and stones, and a scant few are decently paved. They are all, however, really darn wide. I hope that as we go further into the state, we'll get more of those paved shoulders (you can bike side by side) and fewer of those unridable shoulders (cars like you less when you're in the way).

The road we're on is apparently a big trucking route, so we're seeing more and more of the big guys. It's fun to try and gauge what kind of breeze the oncoming trucks will give you - it seems to be a combination of speed, cab design, and whether they're carrying a load or not.

Today Colleen's parents left us to go bend their own joyful footsteps, so we had to put the trailers back on Oof! It was nice to come back from a three-day rest to bike with no trailer. We eased our way back in, and I don't think I would have been able to do 50 miles in yesterday's heat with a trailer, much less 90.  But it was still a minor shock to suddenly be pulling 50 extra pounds again. The trailers do handle well, but there's no getting around the fact that you can feel it with every pedal stroke.

Looking at the Missouri map, we should be out of here at the end of two more days' travel. I hope it stays as blissfully flat as Illinois was...

In which our blissful boredom comes to an end

We knew it had to end eventually, but it was still sad to leave behind the still-water flatness of Illinois and Indiana. Missouri, it seems, actually has some hills in it.  However, Colleen is markedly stronger than she was in New York, and it was fun to watch her carelessly tackle slopes that would have caused problems a few weeks ago. It seems that we didn't completely lose our hill legs. Maybe the break from hills was good!

I encountered a few problems today. First of all, riding behind Colleen's father and seeing him take a spill seems to have spooked me some. He fell in exactly the same way I am always afraid of doing -- he was going up onto the road from a sunken, cruddy shoulder, and got his wheel caught. It could have happened to anyone. Granted, our tires are wider and at a lower pressure, and therefore more capable of handling poor ground, but it was still quite a thing to see. And now here we are, riding along a highway where the road is made of concrete and the shoulder, an inch lower in many spots, is either paved, made of gravel, or in some messy transition state in between the two.  Because of the shoulder's mercurial nature, we do a lot of switching between biking on the shoulder and biking on the road itself, and every time I cross that little line, I steel myself for the worst. This definitely slows me down a bit more than I'd like. Today we had Colleen zooming up and down the hills like a kid set free from training wheels, and me, braking every ten feet like an old fart. I thought it was funny, anyway.

It's fun to be in Missouri. I'm not sure what made the difference, but I suddenly feel like we've come a Damn Long Way and I'm proud of it. It's fun to be able to say "We came from Maine," and have people answer, "What? Maine? The state?" Sure, people were impressed in Freeport, ME that we'd biked from Rockport (ooo), but it feels more momentous to me. We're in the land of radio stations that begin with "K" and people who talk about east-coasters as if they were a separate breed of human. Far, far away from home. All I have to say: Woo!