September 2011
10 posts
September 9
The day is sunnier than I could have imagined, making it hard to keep pressing east when, at every stop, I’m told I should get ready to get wet.
I missed a turn, but took a detour through Wayne National Forest. The road winds and turns, but also slopes back and forth over rapidly changing grades. As much as I’d like to speed through, I contented myself with slowly rocking up one side...
September 8
Today was an unexpected treat. I never entirely left the clouds, but I also never hit rain or even still-slicked roads. Being prepped for a rough day, I sped through the great one across the rest of Tennessee, Kentucky, and into Ohio.
Tobacco is everywhere, not just trailing out of open car windows, in the many warehouses of varying ramshackledness, or county history museums, but fields ranging...
September 7
So far, the storms had been obliging in moving forward while I slept. I’d stop in overcast weather and wake up to sunshine. That stopped 30 minutes into today’s ride up the Natchez Trace.
I didn’t encounter actual rain until the very end of my day, but I stayed under clouds for the entirety. The Trace didn’t shine like yesterday, but it slowly turned to fall and mountains...
September 6
I’d gone to sleep worrying about the cold and rain and heading north. I woke up to blue skies and crisp air.
I rode northeast through Mississippi today, starting off on back roads through small towns and then on the Natchez Trace parkway. Everyone around here I’ve met, both now and previously, warns me that the Natchez is 50mph, and they’ll get ya. I’ve yet to see any...
September 5
I left New Orleans after a weekend of eating, drinking, dancing, and regretting a move to the north. It was the first time in long time that I’d gone out with a friend from the city instead of other tourists or exploring on my own. We talked about how tourists tend to see what they want to see, and, in many cases, it’s the same across every city. (This is the beauty of Hard Rock Cafe....
August 2011
15 posts
August 30
I had a slow start getting out of Austin and made it to the Giddings area in time for lunch. I turned off 290 and followed Round Top Road away from the highway and past farms to pickup a sandwich and cookies for a picnic lunch still farther at Winedale.
No one was around so I ate lunch sitting on the stage of the theatre barn. If you haven’t been to Winedale, it’s operated by...
Texas Forever
On August 18, I rode from Clovis, New Mexico, to Fort Worth, Texas. I pretty much came home. I passed through West Texas mesquite and scrub brush and not much else clinging to the ground. I stopped off at gas stations where photocopied ads for Juan Trujillo, faith healer extraordinaire hung from the door and called for any passing faithful to gather their woes at an upcoming revival. (I would have...
August 17
I had coffee at camp in the morning with an older man from Joplin. He left after the tornado and doesn’t plan to return. Now he’s just wandering and revisiting campsites he went to when he was younger. He has plenty of disdain for the RV crowd, but he travels with a nice complement of shower, air mattress, large tent, and all the other accoutrements necessary to turn a campsite into a...
August 16
I crossed from Utah to the Navajo Nation to Colorado to New Mexico, hitting all the different landscapes the southwest and Rockies have to offer and towns running from artist communities and tourist boutique villages to off-reservation pre-fab communities now left with nothing but rows of identical houses with doors and windows open to the weather and a small structure, a rich man’s shack,...
August 15
I started today off slowly at my camp with coffee and fruit. I’d decided when I woke up to hike in Bryce Canyon, but wanted more to watch the jays fight and screech in the trees and bushes while I had a leisurely breakfast.
I still made it to Bryce before the crowds or the sun made the trails hot and dusty. I hiked through Fairyland Canyon, full of impossible rock towers shrinking in width...
August 14
I woke up with the sunrise in the Mojave and decided to get moving before it got too hot. I’ve been worried that two years spent in New England winters and California summers would have left me unacclimated to the desert heat. They may have, but the 65 MPH breeze and a mid-afternoon ice cream stop kept me comfortable.
I intended to skirt Las Vegas and take the scenic route through the Lake...
August 13
I got off, as usual, to a late start for this trip. A mix of last-minute packing, indolence, and a few essential items (sleeping bag, water bottles) going missing over the summer meant not leaving my house until mid-afternoon. After a detour to a military surplus store to resupply with better gear than I’d lost (goodbye, sleeping bag whose drawstrings regularly tried yo choke me while I was...
May 2011
16 posts
I woke up past Gunnison yesterday with frost covering my boots, bags, and Rusty. My phone had died overnight, so I had no sense of time other than that the sun was peeking over the mountains, but had yet to bring much warmth back along the river. I made my coffee and decided to hurry on to lower elevation.
On my way into the next town, another biker, his ride even more haphazardly loaded down...
When the new rubber hits the road
I spent most of today waiting for fresh tires and cooling my antsy heels while sitting outside in just the most beautiful Colorado spring day at a Starbucks and itching to get back on the road to take advantage of it. Each hour that went by meant less time rolling through the mountains and a closer campsite for the night. I rerouted my afternoon obsessively until, while standing in line, the...
Two days ago Bill told me that the Midwest storms started in northern Texas before moving into Kansas in the middle of the afternoon and heading east into Missouri. If I could make it through Kansas by the afternoon, I should be clear.
I barely made it to Springfield before being drenched into a waffle house to wait out the tree-bending winds and window-shaking thunder. It died down without...
anger and hope
I left Illinois in high winds and found them blowing another storm into Missouri. The storm devastated Joplin, and this part of the country has taken a beating. If you can donate to the red cross, people here can use it.
All along my way, I’d been hearing about flooding along the Mississippi. The weather channel just laid it out, park hosts warned me to be safe, men at diners lamented the...
May 21 evening
I followed my route almost exactly today, but my luck was as good as if I’d been lost. I found a parade, a posse, and a preacher.
Passing through a town not far from mammoth cave, I found a Volunteer Fire Department getting ready for their parade. (The west of Kentucky seems filled with tiny towns and packed VFDs.) I wish I’d asked to ride along a bit, but they...
Lost and Happy
May 20
I spent a lot of today pleasantly lost in Kentucky. I planned a route down the Bluegrass Parkway and towards Missouri over coffee this morning, much farther along than I usually plan as I was thinking a bit about the days ahead and plans for California. One wrong turn down a beautiful back road set up the rest of the day for just following small roads along rivers and railroads that...
We joke...
May 17
This morning Tommy and I joked that I didn’t have many options for a good trip. The Weather Channel played “The Wall” and “It Only Thunders When It Rains” while running down the New England storms, Southern flooding, Midwest tornados, and even rain in Los Angeles. Surely some people who were on the bubble about the end of the world coming on May 21 would be...
August 2009
7 posts
Inexplicable cheerfulness
All day yesterday I couldn’t pin down or shake, not that I tried much, an overbearing sense of cheerfulness. Maybe it was the afterglow of a good day previously, riding through wonderful scenery and making good time, but I woke up ready to do it all again, even knowing that in South New Mexico, especially after Santa Fe going certain ways, my way, there just isn’t much to see.
I...
July 2009
33 posts
