Cross-country bike trip (cont.)



M

July 9. Summer in the Midwest...with geezer, splendidly attired.




Midwest. I am now an apostate Midwesterner. All my life I have contended with those who claimed the Midwest is dull and boring, that crossing Nebraska (or Kansas, or Iowa) is the most stupefying bit of driving ever, that a healthy person can look at only so many cornfields, and that there is nothing remotely beautiful about flat. I held that vast flats have beauty, even sublimity, as the oceans do. I have argued that the metrics of cornfields display the farmer’s art, which sensitive souls should appreciate. And I have defended the delights of the greater Midwest stout-heartedly. No more. By the time we dragged our hot, tired frames into Tuscola IL I’d had it with the Midwest. It is too damn flat. It bores a bicyclist to tears. So many cornfields are an affront to nature and OPEC alike. I can’t say I’m a new man for having discarded my chauvinist views, but you will note I walk a little more erect and my eye is clearer.

Miles. Our journey was 3,299 miles long, from Florence OR to Cape Henry/Virginia Beach VA. The computer on my bike has an odometer which measured each day’s mileage from motel to motel. I actually rode 3,360 miles on the trip, but 61 of those were jaunts out for supper or shopping after we had reached our destination motel for the day. Those are “life-style miles” and don’t count. We averaged almost 72 miles a day. Greg got the glory for traveling most miles per day on July 3, after we parted company in Keosaqua IA to ride to our separate Fourth of July celebrations with friends, he to Peoria IL, I to Springfield. His plan was to cross the Mississippi at Burlington IA and, like the good planner he is, he checked with people along to way to make sure the bridge was open. Like the Missouri River crossing at Nebraska City, there is a low area on the other side where the road is closed at floodtide. But everybody said it was OK, even a county road worker. However, the bridge was closed when he got there, so he had to ride all the way south to Fort Madison IA to cross the river. He ended up riding 119 miles that day, most of it in disillusion and disgust. My personal high mileage day was on July 5 when I rode 105 miles from Hamilton IL, just across the river from Keokuk, to Pleasant Plains IL. It didn’t seem so long to me as Greg’s trek did to him, I’m sure. I was riding down memory lane, following the route that Mary and I used to drive from Springfield to Keokuk to visit my family there. Altogether, we rode a hundred miles, or over, on five days. Our shortest day was going over the Teton Pass from Victor ID to Jackson (Hole) WY, only 27 miles. But nine of those miles were about as straight up as our way ever got.

Misdirection. Don’t even go there!

Misinformation. There’s a persistent school of epistemology that boils down to the proposition “All knowledge is local knowledge.” A traveler in terra incognita, such as the eastern United States, feels the truth of it in his bones. He doesn’t know how the road is ahead, nor, often, where it goes. Is there a place to get something to eat? Something good, or, more to the point, decent? What about a place to stay the night? Once we got through Indiana, where our planning and experience played out, we desperately needed that local knowledge, so we followed what seemed to be the reasonable course and asked locals. Greg is really good at finding people to ask, remembering all the questions we needed answers to, and evaluating the responses. And it just about drove him crazy. Greg believes that people should say what they know in simple, direct language, or just admit they don’t know. It almost never happens that way. Locals are often spectacularly ignorant of their locale. When all signs for highway 50 disappeared in downtown Winchester VA, we asked five different people how we might find the highway again. None knew. We asked two young men who were lounging in an outdoor café where we could find the highway. The smaller of the two shrugged his ignorance, or indifference. The bigger fellow, however, had some ideas. It might be out where a friend once went to find something or other. Oh, wait! Maybe it’s out the other way where that girl who never called back worked. Or maybe it’s… At this point his buddy was rolling his eyes, and steam was pouring out Greg’s ears. But it’s common enough for people to run through events of their lives as they try to recall a particular place. Sometimes they get lost themselves—in reminiscence. Sometimes, a respondent will know where you want to go, but can’t tell you how to get there except in terms that supposes you know already. A college girl in Athens OH, when we asked her how to get to US 50 where the motels are, told us to go down the hill until we come to a shopping center, then turn right. We remained in the dark about how long the hill was, or what distinguished the directional shopping centers from others, or how far to the right we might expect to travel. This, of course, is one of the difficulties of the “local knowledge” school of epistemology: the stranger can’t use local knowledge to understand local knowledge. At other times, misinformation is simply erroneous. That doesn’t make it less irritating, however. For example, Greg talked to an informant about the best route from Fredericksburg VA to Richmond. The guy sounded really knowledgeable. He could estimate mileage; he knew whether shoulders existed, whether they were paved or gravel, and how wide they were. He estimated that the shoulders on one segment of his recommended route were twelve feet wide, almost wide enough for a car to travel sidewise on, if cars could travel that way. That bit should have been a red flag for us, but all particulars in the context left us complacently confident about the fellow’s accuracy. Suffice it to say, the shoulders were the standard 0 to 12—inches, that is—and poor Greg was left fuming again. It’s even worse when the informant’s local knowledge is also his professional expertise, as is the case with the state police. When we were searching for the best way to get from Richmond VA to Hampton, Greg, who by this stage of our journey had a bellyful of locals’ version of local knowledge, called the Virginia Highway Patrol. The dispatcher who answered couldn’t answer questions about Route 60 so, quite correctly, consulted someone who patrolled the road and knew it well. Busy road with wide, paved shoulders, he said. He was exactly wrong; there were no shoulders, but there wasn’t much traffic so the want of shoulders didn’t matter. In general, the level of official misinformation in Virginia was horrendous, and the context in which it was given and misused was so bureaucratically constipated as to be Kafkaesque (see Virginia ). Other misinformation is simply a difference of opinion. We fixed on riding US 50 across from mid-Ohio to mid-Virginia in part because of the testimony of the long-haul biker who just rode it the week before. He claimed it was “good, after you get through the Washington traffic.” He may have got lucky with truck traffic, or just accustomed to really godawful roads around his Maryland home, but his view of US 50 was certainly not ours (see Roads). We did get a taste of local knowledge at its best, however, when we met the tow truck driver in Indianapolis. “Just stay on Warshington,” he said (see Cities). Simple, direct, and true.

Motels. Greg loves to camp and was set to sleep in his tent when he could, having enjoyably traveled that way on previous bike trips. However, my bike couldn’t accommodate front panniers, which I needed to carry all the additional gear necessary for camping: tent, sleeping pad and bag, additional cold weather clothes, space for food, and so on. So, even if I had wanted to sleep on the ground, which I didn’t, it would not have been possible. The more we talked about the trip, the less likely it was that we’d find the combination of a motel for me and a nearby campground for Greg often enough to warrant carrying the extra load. By mid-May we abandoned the idea of camping. The logistical problem then was to find motels at the right intervals. Sometimes, as in Wyoming, the intervals between motels were so long, and motel vacancies so chancey, that we wished we had camping gear. It would have been easy if there had been a motel every 75 miles all the way across the country. But our foreparents didn’t found their towns that way. The closest we came to perfect spacing was in Nebraska. Elsewhere we encountered wide open spaces and small town decay which tested our motel strategy. On a couple of occasions, Greg phoned his wife, Rhonda, to have her look on the internet for motels in towns where we didn’t expect to stop in May. But it all worked out.
The quality and prices of motels varied widely. The gold standard for excellence was set, on the last night of the trip, by a La Quinta motel in Hampton VA. The room was clean and spacious, with plenty of good space for our bikes; all the appliances and fixtures worked; the continental breakfast was spectacular: waffles, hard-boiled eggs, cereals, pastries, bagels, and fruit. The worst continental breakfast was laid out at the Airport Motel in Richmond VA. Fake orange juice (called La La in Mexico!), instant coffee, no fruit or cereal, and just the cheapest Twinkie-style confections; these were the whole of it. The siren call of pancakes came from MacDonald’s that morning. For a long while, we thought the dross standard for grunge was set by the Unity Motel in Unity OR. It didn’t have its own office; one checks in at the country store next door. When we tried, the girl at the counter had obviously no experience at dealing with motel customers. So she called the owner, who thought that Room #1 might be clean. Apparently no other room came close, so we opted for #1. Well, “clean” is obviously a matter for local interpretation. There was a broom by the door for sweeping the clods off our shoes upon entering and, sure enough, there were no large clods on the floor inside. But the beds, the linoleum, the bathroom and the other appurtenances were excessively well-used. The light bulbs were few and dim; the microwave was iffy, and there was no phone. The whole place had the faded, tumbledown look of the photographs of Oklahoma dustbowl farmsteads in the Thirties. I would not be surprised to learn that we were the last guests before the place collapsed altogether. Unity held up as the standard of grunge all the way to Mt. Storm WV, where, after a very long, hot day with lots of climbing, we arrived at the Mountaineer Motel. We looked it over from the road and decided that, despite having reserved a room, we’d try the other motel two doors down. It was just the kind of place we love: a small mom-and-pop place that showed loving care in its tidy, nicely painted exterior, and the gorgeous flower gardens which framed its walkways. Unfortunately, like many other small town motels, it was closed. But it was just the kind of place Greg loved, and we were devastated to have no choice but to return to the Mountaineer. It had an office, which, a long minute after we entered, was commanded by a slatternly, Rubenesque blonde who, amazingly, managed to keep her bosom more or less inside her blouse for the entire registration procedure. It was touch and go, though; we were prepared to leap back at any time. The room to which we were assigned qualified us for hardship bonuses. Faded and dusty drapes hung askew, barely allowing enough light to see the deposits on the carpet, some deep enough to make an archeologist’s heart leap in anticipation. The drapes did keep the air from moving through. Hot air. Humid air. Air that badly needed conditioning. Oops! No air conditioner on one of the hottest days of the summer. We mentioned the lack; our Beatrice confirmed the sad reality. There was, however, a floor fan standing in the corner at an odd angle. Its rakehell posture was owing to its wobbly post. We did turn it on, though, and it did make a fine noise, which pleased Greg, who was keen to drown out the din of small children careening through the parking lot on a motorized off-road vehicle. Lumination was achieved by pulling the chain from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The bathroom, which didn’t look bad in the dark, suffered terribly in the light. Ancient towels, well beyond the cleaning power of Tide, or maybe even Goop, lay on the toilet tank. Make that singular, towel; there was just one. The bathroom door did not quite shut, but did close far enough to reveal the corner behind the door which hadn’t seen maid service since the Hoover administration, I’m sure. In addition to the lint and dirt, there was a fine assortment of bugs, large and small, all dead, I think, and an inch-long cigarette butt, with filter. What to do? In the West Virginian twilight, on top of a mountain, many miles and more mountains away from the next motel, we laughed it off and slept the sleep of babes. We left at dawn the next morning, pleased that we’d survived a stay in the motel that retired the Dross Trophy for Grunge.




July 18. Greg hurrying to escape the Mountaineer Motel.

Motels are usually named for local people or places, if they are not chains. Usually the names are pretty dull—Alpine Thises and Vista Thats abound. But the rule has its exceptions. In Vale OR we almost stayed in the Bates Motel, but chose the Golden Wheel, instead, perhaps because we didn’t want to feel queasy in the shower or to be surprised by Mama. In Corydon IA we couldn’t pass up a chance to stay at the Nodyroc Motel and be amused by the only backwards name we saw on the whole trip.

Most of our motels were middling sorts of places. Econo Lodges, Travelodges, a Motel 6, America’s Best Value, figured among the chains. We also had some nice nights in small family motels. Tourist cabins, probably built in the Thirties, were our lodging for a couple of nights, and a resort was our destination on one. We took pretty much what came our way; I’d guess that we had a choice on a little more than half the 44 nights we stayed in motels. Limited choice meant we were extremely vulnerable to market pressures, as we like to put it these days. Examples of market pressures: the two motels in Glenn’s Ferry ID which were filled up with railroad workers; the motel in Shoshoni WY booked solid for five months by road construction workers; the dozens of erstwhile small town motels which had been turned into low-rent apartment houses because the motel trade had migrated to the interstates; the scores of relics tumbling down in weed patches, their signs obliterated by a decade of neglect. The truth is, we were often glad for what came our way, even if it was a Mountaineer. It just may be that we are the last long-distance cyclists to motel our way across the country. As the small town motel fades into the past, bike tourists in years to come will face too many days that are just too long or ride the interstates. It will be front panniers all ‘round! Everybody camps!

Motorcycles. (see Hazards, road.)

Mountains. This space is reserved for a special mountain. The great ranges—the Cascades, Rockies, Appalachians—have had their due in other entries. This one’s for Laramie Peak, a.k.a., THE LAST MOUNTAIN IN THE WEST. It’s a low, long-shouldered mountain, and it was in sight for two days as we neared the Wyoming-Nebraska border. After that it was just rolling hills and prairie until we got to West Virginia—which was a long way to go without mountains.

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NBA Finals. On the 5th of June, our third night on the road, the NBA Finals, pitting the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, began. It was daring of us to start the trip before finishing the season, but we were both full of hope that we’d spend our long evenings watching the games. Both Greg and I are fans of pro basketball, especially the pre-Shaq, pell-mell style of the Phoenix Suns. But the Suns had set and we were reconciled to a match-up that featured classic rivals of bygone years. We anticipated the fun we’d have, recollecting the glory days of Magic and Larry, Kevin McHale and James Worthy, Kareem and The Chief. My journal entry for the night of the first game was “NBA finals tonight. Adam is jealous.” Adam, our son-in-law, lives out in the Oregon boonies with Beth and two children, but without TV. Unhappily, he loves basketball. After that first night, it was all downhill for us. On the night of the second game we were TVless in the Unity Motel. We did watch the first part of the game on the TV in the bar-café where we ate, but it closes when the last customer leaves and, when all the other customers left, we didn’t want to keep the owner/barmaid up past her bedtime. I fell asleep during the first half of the third game, but managed to stay awake almost through the halftime break of the fourth game. On Friday the 13th of June I wrote in my journal, I I don’t feel I’ve done the NBA finals justice. I fell asleep again last night in the 4th quarter when the game was tied. Next morning, I had to ask Greg who won, even though he appeared to be sound asleep during the whole game. He game me the outcome, including his estimate of the score. He said he wasn’t awake, though; he just hears in his sleep. We were in Victor ID, a pretty remote venue, for the fifth game. We did watch it, or made a good faith attempt, on a grainy, snowy TV. Tipoff for the sixth game saw us in Dubois WY. We had arrived a little late in the afternoon, but I tended to my knitting, got my chores done, and was ready for the game. My last journal entry for that day was, Ate as soon as we got in, at 5:30, called Mary, washed shorts, and am ready to settle into Game 6. I guess I settled pretty well, because that last game in the series, in which Boston hung LA out to dry, caught me in slumberland again. So much for the post-season. From now on it’s one sport at a time; biking and TV basketball are not a good coupling.

O

Oceans. “From sea to shining sea”—the origin and terminus of our cross-country trip. Thinking about it, the seashores presented no problem; we worried about the mountains. In fact, the mountains were much easier than the seashore. At least we found them. Protocol required that we dip our rear wheels in the Pacific at the start and our front wheels in the Atlantic at the end. So, on June 2, we pulled into Florence OR for the initial wheel-dipping. We arrived at twilight, in the rain, having only a general and hazy view of the town’s layout in relation to the ocean. But, we figured, how hard can it be to find the ocean? We discovered it’s not only hard; it’s impossible. We drove around in the dark trying to cross the dunes to the sea. Finally, we gave up and located a boat ramp in the downtown harbor. The ramp goes down to the Siuslaw River, which, technically, is the Pacific because it’s a tidal river. It remained for us to be sure that the tide was in at the dipping. That event occurred early the next morning in the gloom and rain that would be our medium for the next three-and-a-half days. The tide was in. Greg, an ultra-traditionalist when it comes to dipping, was probably a little disappointed, but I felt the baptism was good enough to get us on our way. We never suspected that it would be even more difficult to get to the ocean at the end of our journey. We had set Cape Henry as our goal, mostly because Henry was Greg’s grandfather’s name. So filial piety vastly reinforced Greg’s inclination to the traditional dip. Nothing would do but that we get to Cape Henry and do it. Otherwise, we might have just dunked our front wheels in the Chesapeake Bay (tidal waters, of course) at Hampton VA. But it was so hard to get across the bay via the Hampton Bridge and Tunnel that the dipping turned out to be seriously anti-climactic. (see Virginia.) We learned a good lesson for our beleaguered times: nothing, not even an ocean, is big enough to take for granted.

P

Pancakes and pizzas. I had this idea that we’d be eating pancakes every morning and pizzas every noon and that the totals of each would be among the most unusual and impressive statistics of the trip, perhaps enough to enshrine me in the Guinness Book of Records. It didn’t happen. Astonishingly, I downed only 32 pancakes in fifty days. It’s noteworthy that pancakes seem to be a western breakfast; I ate only six cakes east of the Missouri River. Though the numbers are not spectacular, some of the individual hotcakes were. On the second morning, at Steve’s Restaurant in Springfield OR, I had an absolutely unprecedented breakfast, two pancakes which were so large I couldn’t finish them. Wonder of wonders, two mornings later in Dayville OR, I again got two huge pancakes too big to finish. Self-doubt crept into a soul proud of always leaving a clean plate. Then, in Dubois WY, I ordered two pancakes which were advertised as “plate-size.” What they didn’t say is that the plates were platter-size. Happily, I redeemed my earlier sub-par performances and downed both of them.
We had pizza only twelve times, a surprisingly small number considering its availability in convenience stores, and how highly we prized it as a source of carbs. The most memorable pizzas were in Sisters OR, where we were so hungry after climbing over the Santiam Pass that any food would have been worthy of note. We really hit our stride at the all-you-can-eat buffet lunches at Pizza Hut. I think it was at Gering NE that we arrived at the local Pizza Hut at 1:25 p.m., just five minutes before the buffet closed. The waitress advised us to take all we wanted at once because the food would disappear in a few minutes. By the time I’d finished taking what looked good, I had a plate stacked six inches high with slices of pizza and was seriously doubting my ability to down them all. I told Greg I was relieved that we had no camera to record the pile of pizza. Several minutes later, he got me to turn my head on a ruse and snapped a photo of me and my disgracefully laden plate. The good boy in me prevailed, however, and I left my plate as clean as it was when I got it. Nobody took a picture of that, though.

Paradise Lost. The ride from Boise ID to Bliss ID took us, on the advice of a local biker, down a back road to Glenn’s Ferry and thence, said the biker, to Bliss. We got to Glenn’s Ferry with no problem, then headed down the road to our day’s destination. After a few miles we turned on to Paradise Valley Road which took us down a steep hill into a beautiful valley surrounded by gorgeous, sparsely-treed hills. The sun was shining brightly, the wind was at our backs, and we felt we were truly in Paradise. But, the further we went through the valley, the less sure we were that we would find our way to Bliss in Paradise. We found two Latino workers who told us that we had to go back to the interstate to get to Bliss. They pointed to the road which led us up a steep hill into the teeth of our erstwhile tailwind. A hard slog. When we breasted the hill we could see that the exit to get onto the interstate was nearly back by Glenn’s Ferry. Bummer. Our alternative was to climb the barbed wire fence and walk a hundred yards to the highway. I doubted my ability to lift my fully-loaded bike and worried a little bit about climbing the fence. But it seemed the right thing to do. I clambered over the fence and Greg passed the bikes to me. It was illegal, of course, our first infraction of the trip, but far preferable to returning nearly to our starting point.

Pedal strokes. You might wonder what a philosophically-inclined biker thinks about during those long days on the road. How about “How many pedal strokes does it take to get across the country.” For several days, at boring or difficult moments, I figured out the answer. It takes about 2 ½ million of them. I arrived at that figure by counting strokes per mile a number of times, on various terrains, and averaging the sums. This took quite a long while; my mind would wander during a mile-count, or I would forget whether I was counting in the two-hundreds or three-hundreds, or some situation would arise on the road—a cluster of traffic or one of those damnably loud Harleys—that claimed my attention. But a half-dozen uninterrupted iterations convinced me that 760 pedal strokes per mile was a realistic average for a long haul. The range was from 0/mile, coasting down long hills, to about 4000/mile, on long, steep upgrades. In the end, I thought it was pretty interesting, having never imagined that I could do 2,500,000 of anything.

Q

Questions. On a long ride, you get the same questions over and over again. “Where are you going?” To Virginia Beach, we’d say brightly, then wait for some sign of recognition as they did a geography check in there minds—any Virginia Beaches in Idaho (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, etc.)? “How long will it take you?” Most had no idea; one person in Oregon even guessed six months, which drew a light groan from Greg. Early on, we learned to answer a couple of months. It seemed a reasonable estimate. By the last couple of weeks we knew it would be somewhat less, about seven weeks. “Where did you start?” Florence OR was a good answer. No matter where we said it, in Oregon or West Virginia, it seemd a long ways away to our companions. “Where are you from?” “Green Valley, Arizona,” generally caused some confusion. We usually tried to explain how we’d traveled from Arizona to Oregon because we wanted to ride COAST-to coast. People accepted the coastal imperative with surprising equanimity. “How many miles you ride a day?” When we answered, they’d usually look down at our legs, figuring, I suppose, that the calves might be truer than the tongue. In general, people have no idea how long it takes to get somewhere at ten miles per hour, or that a bicycle doesn’t go as fast as a car. Time and mileage estimates are always suspect. When people asked ‘How’re you going to get home?” they were most eager to know whether we were going to bicycle there. We assured them we weren’t (see Return trip). The closer we got to the end of the trip, the more interesting the questions became. “Are you…umm…partners?” was one of them.