Molly's Journal: Week Seven

The revenge, apparently, of the bugs

Today I felt as if I was the target of a strange international insect conspiracy - like that group that throws pies in famous people's faces, only odder. It's as if bugs are all kamikaze bombers gunning for ME. OK, it's not that bad, but it's still odd. A few days ago,  much to my surprise, a butterfly flew down my shirt and into my cleavage while I was riding. Just ZOOP! and there he was, flapping lamely about. I managed to shoo him out without crashing, but he lost a lot of wing dust down there and I suspect it was curtains for the butterfly after that. Then there was the big buzzy bug today that flew into a vent in my helmet and couldn't (wouldn't) get out and began beating against my scalp. Recently a bee divebombed my yawn, only to bump against my lower lip as I was closing my mouth. Yeeeeh! I didn't need that. I'm waiting for them to work under heavy cover, posing as everyday objects like buttons, to see if I let my guard down. Never, little guys. Never.

We entered a new state today - Kansas. So far, Kansas has kicked Missouri's butt. I liked Missouri - we met plenty of interesting people, it had pleasant rolly hills that were fun to bike on without being unneccessarily difficult, and the state park campground was only $7. $7. I'm still getting over that. But Kansas has well-paved roads with reasonable shoulders, even on tiny tiny highways and state roads. And in my world, roads are the ultimate trump card. Good roads can change the entire character of a day. We were cruising gently over the hills on our freshly-paved shoulder, and I just looked around at the gorgeous day and was filled with a weird happiness. Twittering birds, late-afternoon sunlight, slowly undulating terrain... and GOOD ROADS. Poifect. Then we cruised into a little hamlet called Valley Falls which has municipal camping (not so lush as the MO state park, but it's here and it has running water) and the most charming little downtown ever. It's not touristy-charming like a little seaside Olde Tyme village, just a cute little town whose main attraction seems to be an ice-cream parlor. Kids are roving around on scooters and bikes, people are out on the lawn fixing things or mowing or whatever, and a live band seems to be playing nifty music nextdoor to us. Homey. Friendly. Exactly the sort of place that Bainbridge, Indiana wasn't.

I've got high hopes for Kansas.

Dead skin and live wires

Today was wonderfully brief, although a bit longer than we'd anticipated. After an icky sticky night with no showers in charming downtown Valley Falls, we got up and lingered over breaking camp. After all, since we were only going 25 miles, this shouldn't have been a problem. The fact that we were both sweating while sitting around doing nothing at 9:30 in the morning should have tipped us off that it was going to be really quite hot. I don't remember if it did or not - I only remember complaining about the heat with Cee and then... fog. As if the heat melted my memories away. At any rate, the biking was short, the shoulder was well-paved, and we made it to Topeka. We made it to Topeka COMPLETELY ENCRUSTED in GRIME.

How does this happen? A couple of hours out in the summer heat and suddenly you make flowers wilt as you pass by. White washcloths turn grey just thinking about washing your filthy skin. It doesn't matter if it's three hours or ten, apparently. One problem with life "on the road" is that you are never entirely clean. You can never clean all of your clothes - you have to wear some down to the laundromat and then they get all sweaty. Washing them in the sink just doesn't do as good a job. Sure, it's fine for a wash or six, but after a while, even the most meticulous person will find that clothes simply ferment.

Now, I think the same thing is happening to my skin. No matter how hard I try, there's always a layer of dead skin and road grime all over me. I can spend 20 minutes in the shower, and two hours later I will feel as if I need a shower again. This is why I have been dreaming about finding a hammam when we get to San Francisco. There were lots of them in Paris - public baths ("Turkish baths", maybe?) where you can go hang out all day to get clean. From wet room to dry room to unbearably hot room to the room where you pour water all over yourself, you just cycle through the stages of cleanliness. You can also get a full-body exfoliation, which is an experience not to be missed. I think I lost a pound of skin and then I felt clean for a week. Paris has a lot of North African/ Arab influence, which is, I believe, why I had a hammam across the street from my apartment. One of the fancier ones served you mint tea in small, exquisitely etched and gilded glasses. But right now, I just want that steam-cleaned exfoliated feeling. So! If you know of a place like this in San Francisco, let me know. I suppose a "day spa" would do, but it doesn't seem the same. I'd also be willing to bet that it's probably twelve times as expensive while still failing to be as cool.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a new toy! Last week, my odometer melted. I left it in the direct sun for an hour over a lunch break, and the LCD screen just went blank. Replacing the battery and hitting all the buttons didn't help, leaving it alone didn't help, nothing seemed to kick-start this $15 number-maker back into life. So I've been biking for a week without a constant speed readout. In a way, it's been liberating. I can just concentrate on how I feel, how Colleen seems to be doing, what the lanscape is like, how much I hate Missouri road shoulders, etc., without having the constant geeky impulse to be running numbers in my head. ("OK, so at 12.84 miles per hour and with an average rest stop time of fourteen minutes, we should get to the next gas station by.... let's see... Tuesday.") Instead, I've just been floating along. My knowledge of time comes from either holding my hand out at arm's length (each finger between the sun and the horizon line is about 15 minutes of sunlight - thanks, Guffy) or, I'll admit, from pestering Colleen. This couldn't last, though, so I picked up a new bike computer at the bike shop. I debated between the bare-bones model like I had before and the $100 (!) model with an altimeter and a thermometer and an auto-stop-and-start function. I was won over from the beginning, really, but it took me a long time of squatting in front of the display case to convince myself that this trip is all about toys, and that this particular toy needed a new home on my handlebars. Yet again, Geekiness beat out Simplicity. Now, when we get into the Rockies, I can have numbers every day to prove to myself that these mountains we're climbing really are big nasty mountains. For reference, our hotel room tonight is at 1000 ft above sea level. Hooray for numbers!

We melt.

Today was simple. We got up, I puttered about while Colleen went to a chiropractor to work on her neck problems, we both puttered about a bit, left, came back, left again, chatted with a guy on the side of the road for a good half hour, and left the Topeka area for good at about 12:30 or 1. Then, we melted.

DAMN, but it's hot out here. I didn't really have any idea how much of an OVEN this part of the world is. And it's not "a dry heat," as they like to say about the Southwest. It's a wet, cloying heat that gets up your nose and into your head. It sticks with you, deep in your gut, like a fried bagel. My ice is melting instantly, leaving me with hot water fifteen minutes after leaving civilization. I deliberately did not bring a Camelbak with me on this tour. I have one, and I love it for in-line skating. When skating, especially long distances, it's hard to bring enough water. With my little hydration pack, I can carry enough water for a longish haul, along with a pair of pants, a shirt, and sandals in case I want to look presentable or go into a movie theater and not die of exposure. Heck, I can even carry a book and a Leatherman. But I never liked biking with it. When biking, I found it restrictive and weird. It made my shoulders hurt, it was heavy and strange, it felt sweaty and over-present on my back. I couldn't get the good breezes or anything. Today may convince me that a Camelbak is a fine and wise idea. One thing I hadn't really considered: it's insulated. Meaning, while I'm drinking 80 degree swill, Colleen is merrily sipping on a cool, refreshing pocket of water that still contains an incredibly large amount of ice. Not only is it more pleasant to drink cold water, it lowers your core temperature and keeps you from being so god-awful hot all the time. If I can't pick one up in Manhattan tomorrow (I want one NOW), then I'll ask David to mail-drop me my hydration pack to a little grease-spot in the road in Kansas.

On the up side, I continue to be totally and improbably in love with Kansas. The roads, as we both mentioned, are consistenly well-paved. Even minor roads have a shoulder wide enough for one person to bike on, and it is always as impeccably maintained as the road itself. This is a refreshing change from Missouri, where each mile brought a new type of shoulder irritation. The people are very friendly and welcoming. Last night, we spent quite a long time in Capp's bike shop in Topeka, chatting with the bike guys and the owner. I picked up a new pair of shorts and an odometer, Colleen got some stuff, and (importantly) got her cleats adjusted to help with her knee problem. This will keep her feet in a better and more natural alignment, with any amount of luck, and perhaps diminish the pain. When they were ringing up our purchases, he threw in the cleat adjustment for free. They told us where we should go to see a flick and eat dinner and do laundry and were just generally companionable and cool. In the dressing room, they had a poster for the Paris-Brest-Paris ride, which a friend of theirs had done. (I want to do this in two years.) In the morning when we dropped by again, they offered to buy us lunch. But no, we had to get out of town. On the way out of town, a big white city van saw us pass and a man whose entire face was a grin leaned out of it, asking us where we were going from and to. We answered, he waved, we smiled and pedaled out of town. Several miles down the road, we were stopped by a conveniently-placed patch of corn when the same truck pulls up and offers us water from the big cooler he has on the front of the van. It turns out that Chuck, who was with the Topeka Water Works, was a touring enthusiast and had done several trips on his recumbent, towing a BOB trailer. It was a nice chat. Later on, we stopped in a gas station for some ice and the attendant told us that her boss was a huge touring nut and had done a cross-country trip the previous summer. He caught up to us at the next town and bought us a Gatorade while we swapped stories and chatted. We ended the day on the floor of a Baptist church who gladly took us in when we were weary and provided us with a pleasant, air-conditioned spot of floor with a fridge and power outlets and everything.

I hesitate to mention this, for fear of jinxing what has proven to be good luck so far, but I am dealing pretty well with the heat. Sure, it stinks. Heck, I stink after a day in this stuff. Maybe it's just that old overactive-sweat thing proving useful for once, but I really find that if I pace myself, I can keep going through the yuckiest of days. I used to just become utterly useless in the heat. I wonder if I've adapted? It's interesting to shed old ingrained perceptions of yourself. In my head, I'm a pasty weakling who can't deal with days over 80 degrees. But here I am, still chugging along in a 100-degree 8000% humidity day. Hmm.

Colleen had some water problems that caused her some serious trouble. It turned out that her pack had TOO MUCH ICE in it and she couldn't drink from it very well - so she didn't drink for several miles, thinking we were always just around the corner from a gas station. When we did finally stop, she was red and shivering and felt ill, so we stopped for the night in town at a friendly church. This is our first time staying in a church, and I have to say I felt very welcomed. They were just as accomodating as could be, basically taking in two complete strangers and offering them free run of the place for the night. I couldn't be more grateful.

In which closed-cell foam saves my hiney

Yesterday I learned in five minutes of wearing Colleen's hydration pack that the discomfort involved is more than outweighed by the incredible, life-saving convenience of always having icy water at your disposal in 100-degree weather. Today I learned once again that all Kansans are cool.

Story: we stayed in a church last night 15 miles short of our intended stop for the night because of the infernal heat. This morning, while inflating my tires, I managed to actually break off and lose the little bit inside my innertube valve that keeps the air inside. There I was, happily pumping up the old Prestas at 6:30 AM, completely unaware that the bike was about to fall over on me. But fall it did, and when I removed the pump, there was a snap! and a whoosh! and all 75 pounds of pressure zoomed out of my tube, never to be replaced. It was irreparable, so I had to swap the tube out for our spare. The spare that I had cleverly packed in the "Useless Stuff" section of my duffel at the very very bottom, under the space blanket and next to the tin cup of teas that we have no desire to drink in this ungodly weather.

No cure for it, so out came everything all over the sidewalk. This was when I discovered that I had somehow lost a tire lever, leaving me with only one. One black plastic tire lever that had apparently melted slowly over the course of weeks until it was flimsier than a KFC spork. This makes removing a tire annoying work. Trivial, but annoying. 40 minutes later, I was done and packed up and ready to roll out to Manhattan and get some real breakfast. All of this led to our arrival in town at 8:30 AM instead of 8:00 PM; i.e., just before business hours rather than well after them. This meant that I could get a new Camelbak!  At breakfast, we inquired about local bike shops and were told that there was a nice one around the corner and down the street. We called them up only to find out that they did not open until 10 AM; but, being Kansans, stepped all over themselves to make us feel welcome and actually opened the store just for us at 9. I picked out a pack (a Camelbak Rogue, nice and light) which I liked, picked up a new spare tube, and completely forgot to get new tire levers. And it's a good thing we were able to stop; apparently, Manhattan is pretty much the last town before the Denver area with a good bike shop. The owner talked with us for a while about routes through Colorado. We've decided to take the northern route through Kansas and ask the locals in CO about the best route to take through to Salt Lake City. Which leads me to our next mail drop:

Mary Lewis Tomlinson
General Delivery
St. Francis, KS 67756

We should be there by, oh, Saturday or so.

The other exciting event of the day was the other bike tourists. The last touring folk we met on the road were Gavin and Travis in eastern Ohio. This pack was four guys strong, and they were all carrying BOB trailers! Wow! We don't see many other cycle tourists at all, much less other people using BOBs, so this was pretty exciting. I have to wonder, though, if they'd just started out. Their trailers were so overstuffed it made me wonder if they were moving to Georgia, rather than just riding there. Even if each of them had a luxurious sleeping roll and bag, 1/4 of the camp gear (tent, stove, lights, medicine), three bike outfits, two pairs of shoes, and a housepet, I don't think they could have been using that much room. Maybe they had skates! Who knows? Maybe they just started out and half of that stuff will be mailed home in a week or two. Mystifying. We didn't talk to them for long - in fact, we didn't even stop, just had a hi-hey-nice-trailer-where-ya-goin' conversation from across the road while biking along.

In short: I drank ice water all day, read off numbers from my shiny new altimeter, and saw other tourists. And we're in a hotel tonight, with showers and everything! Bliss.

In which we decide not to go see the midget races

I'll let you in on a little secret - I don't always write my journal entries on the day that they represent. Sometimes I wait a few days and then write two or three at once, pretending while I'm writing it that it's the day in question and I don't know anything about what's to come. Today, though, I'm going to admit that I'm writing the Day 47 journal entry after the Day 48 journal entry and that it is, in fact, Day 48.

This is because the most significant event of yesterday actually happened this morning.

Today (or rather, what I will hereinafter refer to as today: day 47) was long, hot and uneventful. We biked through some incredible heat and stopped in some cool small towns and chatted with some friendly, incredulous people. We saw another group of touring cyclists - this was a group of about 15 bikers heading from San Francisco to the East Coast. They had a big fancy sag wagon with spare bikes and wheels and food and water and gear. They looked happy, but we felt happy to be self-contained rather than sagged. It's a small victory, but at the end of the day, there's a certain pleasure in knowing that you got to your destination completely on your own. We were almost unable to stop in Belleville for the night - apparently, the town is currently hosting their famous "midget races" and all the hotels were booked solid. I gather from the posters that this is not a spectacle of small people running around a track, but rather some sort of car or go-cart racing. Anyway, as a last-ditch effort, we walked up to the Super 8 in town to ask for a room.

"Oh, no," says the desk clerk, "we dont have any rooms, I don't think. Let me check... no, all we've got is the honeymoon suite and it's $85."

Sure! We'll take it! Anything! $85 is a small price to pay to not have to camp in this heat!

"You sure? $85? It doesn't have a TV in it right now."

Yes! Anything! Screw the TV! We don't need it, we're just going to sleep anyway!

We took the room (phew) and they brought a TV up for us. Uneventful evening in which I was too lazy to write this journal entry, but instead lolled about, reading email and my book. Then, sleep.

This morning, the first words Colleen said were, "My knee hurts, and this time it's under my kneecap."  The whole trip, she has been plagued by so many problems I've lost count. I could not bear to be party to her doing anything that would be permanently damaging, so I have to trust her to know herself well enough to stop when it's time to stop. Her knee has been hurting for many states, but until now, the problem has apparently been muscular in origin. Biking too much, putting strain on weird parts of her quad, pulling things in funny ways, but basically reversible muscle problems. I bow to her far superior judgement here, her being a massage therapist and all. But today it apparently moved into a new and scary kind of pain. She has to pick up her pant leg to move her foot about and it seems stiff all the time. We may have to take lots of extra rest days. We may not make it to Salt Lake City. We may not make it to Denver. There's not much I can definitively say other than - we'll see.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT try today's experiment at home.

Today we had our longest stretch between towns - 31 miles. 31 miles at the end of the day, meaning 31 miles that stretched greedily out between 12:30 and 4:15.  31 miles of biking over long hills in the 100+ degree weather, and 31 miles where we had no opportunity to refill our water supplies. For water containers, I have:
 

• My lovely new Camelbak, which keeps things pretty darn cold
• Two normal water bottles mounted on my bike, which will go from ice to hot water in 10 minutes
• Two larger bottles (large gatorade bottles, to be exact - hey, they're free) that, being clear and strapped to a black trailer bag, will go from ice to hot water in probably < 5 minutes.

And, sure enough, five miles short of our destination for the night, I took a sip from my water bag and started sucking against nothing. No water left. Now what? Colleen said that she had some water left in her bag if I needed some, but since she'd been having pains and breathing problems all day, I felt a bit bad about taking water from her even though she assured me that she had enough. (Her bag holds a bit more than mine does, and she'd been conserving water.) It struck me, then, that if I planned on biking from Salt Lake City to Burning Man, possibly solo, then there might be times when I needed water but would have to tough it out until I reached the next farmhouse to beg some up. What would it be like, I wondered, to have no water in the burning heat? How would I perform? Would it make me nervous? Would I conk out instantly? I decided then not to take any water from Colleen and see how my body dealt with it. After all, this was the perfect test case - 5 miles after a long hot day through some terrible sun, and over hills. However, I'd been hydrating perfectly all day, Colleen had spare water should I need it, and we were on a semi-major highway with cars and houses every minute or three. Should anything, god forbid, go wrong, it could be made right again with a minimum of hassle. Also, I felt confident that I would be able to sense impending doom, since I was watching out for it, and avert it before it got too bad.

Note: I knew perfectly well how dangerous and stupid this was at the time. This is evidenced by the fact that I didn't tell Colleen what I was doing, just said, "no, no, really, I'll be fine, I just want to get to town." She tried, sensibly, to talk me out of it, but I was stubborn, so we continued on. (Colleen: thanks for trying. I really, genuinely appreciate it.)

End result: I did OK. I felt a bit more lightheaded at the end of the ride, and after we stopped, I was a LOT more tired than I normally do. I felt beat for hours, just low and tired and sluggish. But I was able to make the ride perfectly well, at a decent rate of speed, knowing that there was Gatorade at the end of it. Interesting! This is another self-conception down the drain. I've always felt that I don't deal well with heat - I melt, my brain shuts off, I can't do anything but lie around and groan and sweat all over everything. I guess I've adapted, at least to some degree. Hope I don't jinx anything with that...

On the knee front, Colleen biked well all day today, but at the end of the ride her problems seemed magnified. More news as it becomes available...

ahhh, rest.

Hey, look: a Google guy is biking across America!  I like seeing other people doing what we're doing. Sure, he's doing it in 3 weeks. But still! I like to think we're in the same boat, or traveling under the same cruise agency, at least.

Today we're in Smith Center again, because we needed it. Lots of sleep and lolling about, a cheesy movie, and a luxurious mid-day nap. No report - no news!