It’s been some time.
I remember someone mentioning at one point, if you don’t feed your blog, it will die.
I look to the plants around my apartment.

Unlikely place for a tomato

Lots happening in the transport world…forever en route.

Over the last three months, I was researching coalition and industry cluster building for electric vehicle technologies in Oregon. I had to stretch myself on this one, not feeling completely comfortable working on driving alternatives. For me, the transportation future involves more choice. It won’t just be choosing to get around by car or pick up or SUV or hybrid or electric car (although I learned that electric vehicles are not cars).

my bike visiting Mark and arcimoto

There is the reality of our existing roadway infrastructure. What do we do with it? It’s expensive to build and maintain. We’ve done a great job ripping up our railroads and turning the unusable ones into other, useful paths. What does the transportation future look like with roadways as the base upon which we build a new system? Does that constrain us to innovating around roadway use? In the short term, I think it probably does.

Through my ride on that December night, I watched the moon get swallowed up in shadow and then found it a dark orange ball, my constant companion the last five miles through the woods and up the windy road to hill crest. By the time I rocketed down the hill into town at just over 40 mph, I kept my eyes on the blackness I knew was the road, feeling it with extended extrasensory perception coming up through my tires, the frame, my pedals, shoes, two pairs of socks into my kinesthetic awareness. My whole body came alive in that moment of rushing sightlessness.

I wonder if I left you too long. Looks like you’re still here, and for that I am thankful. I know I left you hanging, saying, “Stay tuned,” but for how long?

Deadlines. I work best with deadlines. What about once a week? More frequently if I get to it, but I want to make a date with you.

Uncertainty and major transitions can stop me writing. These times of intense change engulf me. I could still raise my flag through the water’s surface, but I think it might say “Eeek” or “Lots” or “Ahh” or “Whoa” or “Drowning” or “Out for a Ride” or “Inarticulate” or “Blistywhoosuh.” Needless to say, all of me you might catch is the first six inches of my forearm and my fist wrapped tightly around the flag stem.

When I got home, all I wanted to do was be at home. I couldn’t even get my bag unpacked it seemed. It wasn’t until the first week zoomed by and Mary & Dermot really did arrive that I put away the relatively small number of items…the monumental belongings that took me and came with me across the country. I never did post about what I was carrying. Let’s see…

Camping gear: tarp shelter (a nice silnylon bit from Integral Designs with a single shock-corded pole), ground cloth (also silnylon), sleeping pad (Big Agnes, 68”), sleeping bag (REI Sub Kilo down bag 20+, short). All this packed tiny, which was one of my main criteria since I had to get everything into two panniers.

Cycling gear: 1 set of cycling clothes (shorts, jersey, athletic bra, shoes, gloves, knee warmers, sun sleeves, 3 pairs of tall socks, wind breaker, rain jacket). I chose to ride fully covered for sun protection. Many of my everyday riding clothes suffered sun bleaching as did my hair. For the cooler portions of my ride, I also had cycling tights, cold weather gloves, and arm warmers. I brought compression tights with me because I thought I might use those for sun protection. As it turned out, they created more problems cycling than they solved, and I sent them home, unused.

Two water bottles (a large and small because that’s what fits on my bike) and a collapsible 1-liter water botte. Front and rear bike lights. A U-Lock. This was kind of unnecessary, but it provided psychological comfort. I had a packet of tools: pedal wrench, chain tool and two pins, one set allen wrenches, one cycling multi-tool, open-ended wrench, socket attachment and screwdriver for it, tire levers, patch kit, one spare tube, lube (Tri-flow), two rags, spoke wrench, 2 replacement spokes (one front, one rear). I used the pedal wrench to hammer my stakes into the ground sometimes. Don’t tell anyone. I might have had more tools than that, but that covered most of it.

For my body, I had Chamois Butter that I ran out of and replaced with As Master – that’s a long S on the As. One tube of sensitive skin SPF 30. I carried supplements with me also since I had (and still do) some joint issues with my left hip: glucosamine sulfate, calcium (long-distance cyclists are at risk for osteoporosis), anti-inflammatory formula, and high EPA fish oil. Some homeopathic remedies I carried included: Sportenine (which I didn’t use), arnica, apis, ledum, and rhus tox. My first aid kit also included ibuprophen, Epi-Pen, three bad kitty band-aids, tiny Swiss Army knife, x-acto knife, small pair of scissors, glue stick, q-tips, two little hair clips and one hair tie, and later a shell Daniel gave me in New Jersey. I carried all these little items in the packaging for the ultralight dry bag I used to protect my computer from moisture. The supplements I carried in plastic bottles and containers. I’m not sure why I bothered with the bottles, but I had room for them so I did. Given my occasionally clumsy and chaotic travel style, I guess this seemed the safest way to prevent a disgusting supplement mess in my gear.

My toiletry kit grew while I was out from a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in a bulk food bag to also include: a hotel-sized bar of soap, floss, a small bottle of shampoo, and a hand sanitizer bottle of conditioner. This last item I picked up in Twin Bridges, MT, because I couldn’t stand what was happening to my curly hair out on the road. It was bad enough having horrendous helmet head all day, but I really needed something to help define my curls just a bit while I was out there. It’s the little things that really make a trip. I also had a comb that didn’t go in the plastic bag and a medium sized Pack Towel.

In Eugene at Vintage

Food items I carried with me were pretty basic. Gu gels, Clif Builder bars. After a time I collected more food items since I found fruit and veggies difficult to come by. I liked having dried fruits with me and nuts. Oatmeal in different forms came along. Instant oatmeal packets worked pretty well since I didn’t need to have a bowl or cooking anything to go along with it. I did pick up a plastic spoon somewhere along the way that I held onto. On the early part of the trip, I carried jerky.

The idea of a bright green sofa

Pi Punkin

I’ve probably forgotten a few things, but that largely covers it.

All of this stuff stayed in the black duffel I picked up in Fairfax to make the train ride back easier. When Mary & Dermot said they’d be in Eugene a week after I got home, I decided I needed to put the stray items away so the place would look presentable for guests.

It really is green, that wall

“It doesn’t have to be long.” I keep trying to remind myself of this, to write shorter posts.
“I thought you gave yourself a time limit?”
“Oooh, that’s a good idea. I did give myself a deadline, but I need a time limit too.”

I spent the first week home thinking about how I needed to write about my train ride. In that way I would complete my trip narrative. However, the question of what would become of En Route Transport still remained. At one point I decided that the trip would end, I would finish my blog on that matter, and then something new would begin. But I didn’t quite know what the new thing would be. I still don’t.

Before I could paint another wall in my apartment Dragon Eyes, school started.
“What am I going to do with the blog?”
Well, that question will answer itself as it goes.

So many times people asked me if I would ride back, and I always responded with relief and glee that I would take the train. Most of the responses to my declaration were mixed, some astonished that I wasn’t flying and others brightening with the thought, “That’s such a great way to see the country.”
Of course, seeing the country by train in no way compares to seeing it by bike, but train provides some needed accessibility to the countryside that you can’t get in a plane. Let’s face it, most people aren’t going to ride their bike much distance to see the country. I didn’t encounter anyone who was out to see just a little bit of the country on a tour – as if it’s an all or nothing kind deal.

Nonetheless, the train provides a great opportunity to chat with people about why they choose taking the train over other forms of transportation. Many of them don’t like flying, don’t like dealing with all the hassles of airports – undressing, security, limitations on liquids, long lines, no leg room, regulation on movement….etc. The train becomes more a part of the journey and less a tube you get crammed into to come out exhausted and jet lagged on the other side.

I bought my train ticket back well before I even departed Eugene. I learned a thing or two through that process. When I first looked at the ticket – probably in March for a September ride – it seemed economical enough to get a sleeper car for the segment of the ride that would take two nights. The whole trip itself would take three nights, and I wasn’t sure how I would do that long in coach. Last summer, I took the train back from my first tour when I pedaled from Eugene to San Francisco. That train ride took 16 hours, most of which was overnight. I sat in coach with someone next to me the entire time. I had difficulty sleeping on that ride, so I wasn’t thrilled about having three sleepless nights on the train. In March, looking at the ticket, a sleeper car for one segment of the ride was $300 extra, bringing the entire ticket cost to $550. I didn’t buy the ticket right away.

In early June, I took the train from Eugene to Portland with Daniel, a young, transportation savvy honor’s student. We were headed to the Oregon Bicycle Summit and a weekend in Portland. He had all kinds of excellent tips for riding the train.

Montana

That all seemed easy enough. I would figure out how to sleep on the train. I bought the ticket. Without the sleeper car and with the Student Advantage discount, it came to $187.

As I learned taking the train from St. Louis to Philly and then again from Philly to Charleston, you must purchase a ticket more than three days in advance for Student Advantage to apply. And, it would have been helpful if I remembered I made an Amtrak account with my Guest Rewards number…or even that I could have looked on that reservation for my return ticket to get the number. Oh well, I logged some miles on train that no one counted (right), but I got where I needed to go. It’s all good.

I boarded the train in Washington, DC, at about 3:45 for the 4:05 departure. The train to Chicago was pretty full, and I had someone next to me the entire time. I made some small talk with him early in the process and learned quickly he didn’t want to have much interaction with anyone. Fine. I had plenty of books to read and a box of snacks. I was good for a while.

Getting to Union Station was a little challenging. With all my bike gear stowed in a duffel bag, plus a backpack of to-go items, and my bike, I couldn’t navigate public transit very well. I had too much stuff. I made my first transition to the train by taking a cab from the hotel to Arlington where I stayed with some family of friends. Their dog Biscuit helped unencumber me of some gear by chewing up one of my water bottles immediately. Good dog Biscuit, good dog. The next day, Sam gave me a ride to the station, and I somehow managed to schlep all that gear to the ticketing counter (with the front wheel off of my bike). I checked in easily and then had to go around to the baggage area with my bike and wait for a box. I took the pedals off while I waited.
“You’re gonna need to put that front wheel back on. That way the forks don’t poke through the box. And then you need to twist the handlebars to the side.”
Everyone does it differently.
At the bike shop in St. Louis, they packed my bike small for shipping. In putting it back together, I learned some tips for being kind to my handlebars and cables. I removed the front brakes so the cables wouldn’t get kinked during transportation and taped the handlebars to my frame so they weren’t flopping around. I took the rack off back in the hotel room…that thing makes boxing impossible and it’s 100% awkward to carry. I had it embedded in the duffel with clothing taped around the poking ends to prevent punctures and skewering of who knew what. I put the wheel back on, and we rolled my bike backwards into the box. The person helping me taped it up and away it went.
With just an overstuffed backpack, I wandered back out into DC to meet Christopher for lunch. The backpack is a no-no item in museums and galleries, so after lunch I returned to the station to wait out the remaining hour.

I slept fitfully on the way to Chicago. I’d neglected to bring anything warm and found myself rather chilled in the air-conditioned car. At 4 a.m., I gave up on sleep and quietly climbed over my sleeping neighbor. I wandered about the train and discovered a quiet car on the lower level with two side by side vacant seats. For grins, I thought I would lay down there for a moment and see how it felt. Well, I fell asleep for another hour. Bonus. I got up and went to the lounge car to wait the opening of the club car and watch the sunrise. At 6 a.m. I went downstairs and got a tea, came back up and watched the glowing show. Somewhere out there between the horizon and the low cloud cover, the sunlight shot its rays into the layer of clear sky and reflected off the clouds above in a silky fuchsia display.

I finished reading A Homemade Life and wanted to spend some time in my kitchen exploring and sampling the recipes. I had to wait. And that’s the funny thing about taking the train, no amount of impatience makes it go any faster. I suppose nothing moves faster just because I’m impatient, not even me.

Arrival in Chicago was a little strange with the time change. For a while, we were traveling after we were supposed to arrive until we crossed the time zone and then were early. I have no idea if we were early or not, we might have even been late, but since I had a long layover, I didn’t care much what time it was.

I got off the train and headed out on the town. I thought I would walk around for a couple of hours, get some exercise. When I popped out of the train station I saw a sign that said “Downtown” and “Lakefront,” so I walked that way. I passed by the globe in the backdrop of the parade from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I walked under the El, the elevated train and gave a few thoughts to elevated transportation infrastructure. I saw a building ahead that caught my interest where the street ended. Then, to my right, I saw a stationer’s store with vintage posters in it. I had to go in. Of course, the first cards I looked at were letterpress from Portland. Home sweet home. I didn’t miss it, did I? I saw a lot of Edward Gorey works in the shop and began to wonder again if I was in a Gorey hot spot. I found a few cards to bring home and then went across the street to the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had only a couple of hours, but I couldn’t imagine time better spent than in looking at art. I got my ticket, checked my backpack, and made a b-line for the information desk. “Do you have any of Gorey’s works on display?” This time, they knew who I was talking about and made a quick computer query.
“We have 47 of his works, but unfortunately none is on display. They’re mostly decorated envelopes. I could show you some of what we have here on the computer.”
I peered in at the envelope, envious of the person who got to receive such a wonderful letter and simultaneously contemplating the degree to which I do and do not decorate envelopes when I send letters. Sometimes I made the envelopes out of odd bits of things, and that’s fun, but I don’t decorate them so often.
“Well, that’s pretty good, especially if it’s as close as I can get to seeing his work. What should I go see instead?”
“What do you like?”
“Well, I like Gorey’s work, ephemeral art, Art Deco.”
“There are some nice pieces in the decorative arts area,” he pointed to a map, “and then anything in the Modern wing.”
“Great. Thanks!”

He was right. I saw a George Nelson chair, Frank Lloyd Wright desk and chair, and a couple of Deco shelves and dressers that struck my fancy. I wandered into a special collection and saw some weird stuff and was about to take a picture of a picture of someone licking someone’s eyeball when the security guard stopped me. Even though I’d asked what was appropriate to take pictures of, I couldn’t decipher the seemingly invisible demarcations in the galleries.

I saw some more de Kooning and Pollock. They had an early Pollock on display, one in a series before he began the drip paintings. It’s tough to say what the difference is in my mind, but the whimsical scribbles of de Kooning on raw canvas attract me more than the revolutionary drip technique of Pollock. I like how de Kooning scribbled with paint and then pulled shapes out by painting over the mess. His work had layers and edges I could get into. Maybe that’s where I am these days because I work with tape…less so the drips. Tape doesn’t drip.

I turned a corner into a “white” display. About five large works of white hung on the walls fastened in various ways with some exposed metal. I liked the piece in the center best because it had a bend in it, which made a neat shadow, and the bottom of it was unpainted metal. I liked how the materials created depth. When I worked at the art museum in Dallas, I went to a briefing on an artist who worked in white. I liked the concepts, the play of the art, but I figured most people would find that inaccessible – not exactly a crowd pleaser. I stood in the gallery for a little bit contemplating the “art.” Two women came in engrossed in conversation and stood for a minute in front of the center piece that I liked. Then they walked out. I wondered if they were just in conversation or if they had something to say about the art. Couldn’t tell. Then a family peered around the corner. They did, they just peered. Then they turned around and left. That made me laugh. I looked at my watch and decided to check out the architecture and design area before heading back to the train station.

I stocked up on food to go for dinner that night. With the other snacks I had with me, I figured I’d be able to make it two nights on the train. We boarded promptly and soon began the motion that would bring me across two more time zones to Portland. As I was getting settled, I asked the conductor, “Is there anywhere I can get a blanket?”
“They have two kinds for sale in the club car. The thinner one is less expensive.”
“Thanks.”
At least I didn’t have to concern myself with being cold all night. What a relief. The Portland car had few passengers in it to start, and I had two seats to myself for the two nights. This meant I could sleep halfway decently. Given my early trepidation about not sleeping, it worked out well. I wouldn’t call it delicious sleep…I still wanted to really stretch out, but it was enough to keep me from being cranky.

I got up early each morning to watch the sun rise. One morning I met Larry from Eugene who had much the similar path to mine. Both of us had the same sequence and location of residences before moving to Eugene. What are the odds? Later that morning I met Mike who was coming from New York to stay with family in Seattle and look for work doing international relations things on the west coast. He wanted to see the country, and the two of us enjoyed being surprised by the abundant wetlands in North Dakota and Montana’s big sky (with low cloud ceiling).

As night fell, we wound through Glacier National park. We could see the scenery was probably spectacular, but the mountains held onto their fog shrouds, letting only their ankles show.

I decided to try a meal in the dining car for the experience of it. By the time reservations came to me, I had to wait until 9:15 for dinner. You know, my body thought that was midnight, but what the heck? It was my last chance to experience the dining car since the train would split in the middle of the night when we reached Spokane. One half of the train with the dining car would go to Seattle. The other half of the train with the lounge and club car would go to Portland. Seating in the car was European style, and I shared the table with a mother-daughter duo headed to Evergreen State College for orientation and a man who seemed upset that he had to share a table with others. It was a nice change of pace to dine, but I have a feeling the people who had sleeper cars got a better deal on the meal.

In the middle of the night I woke for a time while the train split in Spokane. When I opened my eyes in the morning and wandered into the lounge car, day was about to break over the Gorge. We were so close to home I could nearly taste it. Barring the taste of home, I got a tea and bagel downstairs and giggled that the bagel with cream cheese went into the microwave like everything else a person would order there. A couple from one of the sleeper cars joined me in the lounge car. They had a much fancier breakfast than mine. He was retired navy and she is a nurse. They were doing something with the historical society at Glacier and then heading out to Portland to continue the vacation with family. Home was in Ohio. He thought windfarms were a waste. I remember enjoying his perspective on things, but the details are lost to me now. I realize I wanted to get home so badly I could think of little else.

Mt Hood

The train-bus to Eugene was full to capacity. I sat next to a woman who does property management. She was headed to Eugene to meet her husband and attend the Further show. I had a feeling more than one person on the bus had the same destination.

We stopped in Albany, and I hopped out to receive a welcome back greeting from my parents. I didn’t think the stop would be very long and then it was longer than I thought. We had about three conversations interrupted on that very brief visit, but how wonderful to come home in one piece and prove it to them.

The bus carried on to Eugene where we all unloaded, me into a sunny afternoon and welcoming arms. My bike and bag of gear also arrived with me in one piece, undamaged. After all that moving about, what a sweet finish…on time and all together. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Here concludes the summer journey.

En Route Transport lives on. I’ve taken this week of return to enjoy not having to go anywhere. I still haven’t put away all my stuff. I decided to redecorate a bit at home, make some art, puzzle, and puzzle over how this work will evolve. Also, today, a press release from Oregon appears to have made it all the way to Washington, DC. Some of you may recall that while in New Jersey I took a break from pedaling to finish writing a grant proposal for the next phase of my work. Well, Lane County was awarded the grant to develop a Scenic Byway/Bikeway Management Plan for the Territorial Heritage Tour. I’m excited.

Stay tuned.

Activity crescendos, and for all the abundant wifi connections in rural America, in Washington, DC, internet connection on 12th between G and H comes with a price tag I don’t want to pay. I also have a presentation to give, and when I arrive at the conference and peruse the schedule, I realize I won’t have much time to put one together. Deadlines work for me because I finally put aside all my other distractions and get to work. Sometimes the distractions are not necessarily distractions. I don’t consider my relationship with you a distraction. I find this correspondence incredibly nourishing.

Nonetheless, I checked into my conference room early and set to work on the presentation, starting first with the draft paper I wrote back in Eugene prior to leaving. At the time, that was another one of those necessary deadlines that I put off and then squeezed out like toothpaste onto my toothbrush. That effort was helpful now. I reread my synopsis of bicycle history connected to Oregon’s historic roadways and the connection of this history to economic development.

Something’s missing.

I diagramed my ideas. I had three kinds of historic resources I wanted to discuss. There were also three planning strategies.

How do I explain this? Makes sense in my mind, but I struggle to explain to others. It takes times. Visuals might help here. What do you think? Juggling. Venn Diagram?

Time to go to the reception. I had a lot of ideas but nothing concrete. All the same, I figured I could go to the reception and meet some people. I hadn’t left the hotel all day. The reception was in the National Building Museum. When I visited DC in May for the Women in Transportation conference, my fellow scholarship winner from the University of Oregon and I skipped a morning of presentations to join the hoards at Bike to Work Day and then ducked into the Museum to see their exhibition on parking garages. We had a great day geeking out outside the conference context, indulging our interests in cycling and art. Couldn’t miss the opening reception.

I was a bit spaced out heading down the elevator into the great unknown. I wasn’t exactly sure where I needed to go. I stepped onto the elevator, and there was Christopher.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“On your way to the reception?”
“Yep.”
He walked quickly, reminding me of what it was like riding the streets of DC with him back in May. As soon as we got to the reception, he got swallowed up in socializing immediately as a good conference chair ought to. I made my way to the beverage table and got a glass of water and a glass of wine surveying the scene. Seemed like most people knew someone.

I found an info piece on Modern architecture in DC and browsed that for a time.
“I feel like I’ve showed up single at a wedding.” I’d just been counseling my niece the day before on meeting people at school.
“Probably the reason no one says hi is because they want someone to say hi to them.”
That’s the tough action. I thought I’d take my own advice and found some other people who were free radicals floating around the reception.
“Hi. Have you been to this conference before?”

It worked. I had a good cycle of conversations, people joined the discussions. I learned of the local celebrity status I’d achieved.
“Oh, are you the one who rode across the country?”
“I am.”
“I read your blog. I’m looking forward to going to your presentation.”
“Awesome. That’s good motivation for me to get my presentation together.”

I met people working with scenic byways, cultural resources, bridge preservation, departments of transportation, fish and wildlife.

Suddenly I got a call.
“Where are you? How do we get your bike to you?”
“How long does it take, 30 minutes to get downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s meet at the hotel at 8:15.”
“Ok. See you then.”

I went back to the conversation for a time with discussion animated by the roving hors d’oeuvre trays.
“Do you have a card?”
I totally forgot about business cards until that moment. On the ride I’d been handing people a tag with my blog address, email, and name…a small handwritten item. I didn’t have any left and completely spaced the benefit of having a nice stack of cards for such events. Oops.

I took my leave abruptly. “Excuse me, I need to go. I need to pick up my bike.”
Uncle John came with Emily, and Emily helped me take the gear to my room. I had her drive my bike while I lugged the heavy bag with gear.

Settled back into the motel room and started scouring the web for historic images of roads and bicycles. Talk about a good way to eat up some time, but this is usual for me. Translating text to image can be difficult, and I didn’t have a folder of historic bicycle photos at hand. I managed to get the background history segments finished before going to sleep. I started looking forward to the nap that would get me to 4 a.m. wake up time so I could work more. Just like being in school. I wanted to attend the conference sessions. It seemed silly to have made it the whole way to this moment only to shut myself in the hotel room and work on my presentation without listening what other people had to say and meeting the premium quality road nuts.

The short of it, I don’t recommend waiting to the last minute to create a presentation. I attended most of the Friday conference but skipped one session in the afternoon. It’s sort of like eating potato chips. I started working on the images and soon the lunch break was over, and I couldn’t pull myself away from Photoshop. Just two more images that were open on my desktop. Then I got caught up tweaking color fields. Soon, 3:30 came, and I went back to the last info session of the day.

Dan Marriott gave the opening presentation, a wonderful story rich with imagery.
Holy smokes! Are all the presentations going to be like this? I found the bar he set quite a reach. I wasn’t even going to get close. The afternoon session I attended relaxed me somewhat. Whatever I had to say wasn’t anything I’d written. Many of the presenters simply read their presentations. Still, I learned about the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and had the opportunity to hear an engineer’s perspective, a landscape architect’s perspective, and a preservationist’s perspective.
They have nothing to say about bikes.
I wondered about that, but given the way they described traffic moving on the byway, it didn’t sound like the kind of place a bicycle would want to go. I heard certain death in it even though it was my own mental process that came to it. Curious though, I would think that a parkway and an All American Road Scenic Byway would attract cyclists. People even commented from the audience that as a tourist, the local traffic has no tolerance for people even driving slowly on the Parkway. How can a person appreciate the individuality of each bridge along the way?
We had a lively discussion on the difference between trees adjacent to the roadway versus clearing the roadside up to twelve feet to reduce the number of “collisions with objects.” Apparently trees like to jump in front of cars. Perhaps they should install signs: Tree crossing.

Signs hold their own categories of debate.

I got a quick take out dinner and breakfast next door to the hotel and went back to my room and pulled in the latch string.

In the morning, I had nearly gone through practicing my presentation out loud one time through before making my way to the presentation room. The other presenters were speaking on cultural aspects of roadways. Robin, from Bend, OR, discussed the Cascade Lakes Byway and the work she’d been doing to incorporate art and indigenous culture and history into the roadway’s interpretation. Two presenters from Virginia described the large heritage area of which a scenic byway forms the spine. In this area, battle sites of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars pepper the countryside.
Then I got up and told my history of the bicycle and roadbuilding in America followed by some discussion of bicycle tourism projects and programs in Oregon. I found a great picture of cyclists riding on BikeCentennial, which gave me a chance to talk about what happened to the bicycle in its long sleep while the automobile gained ascendancy in America. I concluded with lessons learned from the road, elements a community might want to consider when developing cycling programs.

Finally, I could relax.

I learned a bit about Indiana’s roadway preservation programs and financing strategies for restoration projects. The Dixie Road. …

Over lunch, I conversed with Nathan from the Department of Fish and Wildlife about opportunities to connect wildlife refuges and other natural areas to a variety of transportation modes.

After lunch, I attended a presentation on one of the unpaved roadways in the Australian outback. I recalled that Robyn Davidson had traveled much of this road on her trek with the camels. It’s no coincidence.

After presentations, I walked Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and Union Station and back around to the hotel.

Apologies to my readers, but at this point I didn’t bring the camera with me.

Sunday morning I decided to be on vacation. I hefted a NYT to a little café with wifi down the street and enlisted some help at home via iChat to work through a few blocks of the crossword. Outside, the gray drizzle reminded me of fine Oregon mornings, and over the iChat, I watched the day lighten from inky blue to white haze. I felt that close to normal.

Just as I was about to see some art, I got a message from Mary & Dermot. After an unexpected twist of transportation, they were in DC that afternoon. I turned away from the museum and headed to Chinatown to meet them. For as many times as our paths have crossed, it can’t be coincidence. They were trying to make it around DC without anything. They had only the cycling clothes change and shoes they pedaled across the country, their essential items toted in little bags. I may see them yet one more time before they fly back to Wales…if they make it to Eugene. Mary gave me her dog repellent spray. She didn’t want to lose it traveling on the plane and said she would pick it up on the west coast. We’ll see. Wonderful surprise.

I looked at art. That was my great treat of vacation. I saw an exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts made during internment, Calder’s kinetic sculptures, Running Fence, and a variety of other contemporary artworks…de Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell, others.

Dan hosted a party on Sunday evening. He had an incredible view on the eighth floor and he’s an amazing cook as well. I took a cab with several of the Australians to the apartment and had some amazing conversations of my trip and of subjects Australian. Later in the evening, I chatted with Alicia from Spain who did a pretty good job wresting a story of her experiences from Spanish into English. She told me that the hostel she was staying at was in a sort of shady part of town — not unlike what Mary & Dermot had reported earlier. She swore that one of the women she’d seen standing on the street corner one night she encountered at the restroom in a subway the next day.
“I can’t be sure…how she was dressed made me think…but who knows…it was incredible! She looked very much like the person I’d seen the night before.”

Christopher with Dan and Julia in the background

The original joke was an email exchange that my Mom started. I recently returned to school for another degree. I took a course called “Transportation and Preservation” and loved it. My Mom is a preservationist herself and forwarded an email announcement about the Preserving the Historic Road conference to my brother and I with the message, “Let’s go and stay with your Uncle.” I looked at the message for a moment and responded, “Ok. I’ll ride out and meet you.”

And then it started.

I’m crazy enough to think that an idea like riding across the country is within a “normal” range of activity. To see it as a realistic undertaking, I had to figure out how I could cram training for a cross-country ride into my schedule. Once I committed to training, I wrote a letter to one of my good friends, “I love the idea of riding across the country, but I don’t want to go broke in the process.” I started fundraising, which began as a networking project. Soon, I had the ear and interest of Adventure Cycling. I submitted an abstract to the Preserving the Historic Road conference and was selected to present a paper on bicycle tourism as a rural economic development vehicle. Then I began fundraising and researching in earnest: I had purpose, destination, and deadline.

* How did you get involved with the Adventure Cycling Association?

I used Adventure Cycling maps the previous summer during my first bicycling tour. They were one of the first organizations I contacted as I started to develop my project idea. They responded positively, and we began a dialogue to determine the best ways we could support each other’s work.

* As part of your journey, you are distributing decals to local businesses along the route as a way to indicate to cyclists who follow, that they are cyclist-friendly businesses. This is all part of the Adventure Cyclist Association’s effort to boost bicycle tourism as a vehicle for economic development among rural communities along the route. How did this idea come about? Is it working?

There are a number of efforts underway to give cycling and bike-ped infrastructure projects higher priority at local, state, and federal levels. One of the significant challenges to elevating bicycle projects’ priority comes from the absence of measurable data on the number of bicycle tourists and their economic impact in communities. When it comes to approving funding for projects, policy makers want to have a clearer sense for the return on investment with these projects.

Distributing decals is a beginning step toward establishing dialogue with businesses along the routes. If the businesses support bicycle route development, for example, we cultivate additional support and advocacy for these projects and may be able to enlist the businesses in helping collect data.

Additionally, in most places across the country, it’s impossible for cyclists and non-cyclists to know that they’re traveling on established bicycle routes. By inviting businesses to post decals, the route becomes signed and the likelihood that more people learn they’re on bicycling routes increases. The more cyclists and motorists know to expect one another on particular roadways, the more comfortable travel for both becomes.

* How do you know where to go on your trip? I notice that the Adventure Cycling Association produces and publishes many route maps as well as a Cyclists’ Yellow Pages. Are these your primary tools?

For most of my travel, the Adventure Cycling maps are indispensable. I didn’t have time to develop my own route. Adventure Cycling has done a phenomenal job selecting low-traffic and scenic roads to ride and coding communities and settlements for essential services. I follow the route and use the elevation profile included with the map to help gauge how far I will go each day and then evaluate the towns for desired services. Since I travel with no cooking gear, it’s important to know where I can get food or meals. Lodging options are also a priority. The maps have icons to differentiate between camping, hostel, motel, and bed and breakfast services and then provide further specifics on the reverse of the map including phone numbers, location, and other specific or relevant information.

I haven’t yet used the Cyclists’ Yellow Pages, but I can glean most of the services I need from the ACA maps. One cyclist resource that comes in handy for a trip like this is warmshowers.org, a site for touring cyclists to arrange lodging with other cyclists at their homes. Many cyclists also blog on crazyguyonabike.com, but I have not used this site yet. Many of these blogs contain information on roadways and cycling routes off of established Adventure Cycling trails along with tips on where to stay and where to avoid.

* Are you making your trip on your own?

Every cyclist has a unique trip, I expect, even if we travel the same trail. Most cyclists seem to be out for the satisfaction of personal accomplishment. My motivation comes from learning about the communities and the people who live in them. I collect stories. Also, my trip explores sustainable transportation networks. I want to learn how cycling can be one part of a journey for people. Through this study, I’d like to make overnight cycling trips (even if they’re just one overnight) accessible to all kinds of people and not just us crazies who can take several weeks away from home to ride thousands of miles.

* How far do you bike each day?

My daily mileage depends much upon the distance between towns, terrain, and weather. For most of the trip, I averaged 75-88 miles per day. I had some short mileage days and some days (although not many) that I rode over 100 miles. I don’t ride with a cycling computer, however, so I had to calculate my mileage from the maps.

* How long is your journey taking you?

I set aside ten weeks to arrive at my destination in Washington, DC. My entire trip from Eugene, OR, to Eugene, OR, will be just over 12 weeks. I’m taking the train back to Eugene from DC.

* I bike daily to work and dream of making a trip like yours. What advice do you have for novice bike travelers like me?

Keep biking to work. Riding your bike daily is a great way to love your body, love your bike, and develop tolerance and skill for what you encounter on a daily basis – good weather conditions, bad weather conditions, good road conditions, bad road conditions, nice drivers, and mean drivers. Bicycle touring requires psychological training as much as it requires physical training. Invariably you will encounter something you find challenging or difficult. How do you get through it?

If you’re interested in going on a long distance bike ride, start with a manageable trip. Go for an overnight. Go for a week. Go for two weeks. Set a reasonable goal – one that will stretch you and give you a solid sense of accomplishment but not one that will be over-ambitious, unless your goal is to cure yourself of impassioned fever for a long-distance bicycle ride. Go somewhere you like or that you’ve always wanted to go and give yourself time to see things or go on diversions. When you have a tightly set schedule, it can be difficult to go eight miles out of your way to see something that piques your curiosity or to take an extra day in a place that makes your heart sing.

Talk to other people who have been bicycle touring for tips or ideas. Join your local cycling club. Go on long rides on the weekend or whenever you can work it into your schedule. Set cycling goals. Spend some money on a nice pair of cycling shorts. Make friends with the staff at your cycling shop. Know how to fix a flat, patch a tube, and lube your bike.

* I really enjoyed your commentary on Cooky’s Cafe in Missouri. What were some of your other favorite food spots along the way? (I imagine food is of primary importance when you’re biking so much!)

Funny, this is the one question that I’ve spent most time thinking about on the road. Food has a kind of primary importance on any cycling trip because it fuels the engine. The best food spots are usually the ones that have what you’ve been fantasizing about for miles. I had recommendation from some cyclists in Lowell, ID, that Lochsa Lodge near the top of Lolo Pass (the high point at the ID-MT state line) had great food. The ride from Lowell to Lochsa Lodge is 66 miles without any services along a gorgeous and winding road that follows the river. I found the gentle grade enjoyable to ride, but I had quite an appetite when I arrived at the lodge. While it can be sometimes embarrassing to eat as much as I ate that afternoon, the Lodge more than satisfied.

I had an amazing breakfast in Eminence, MO, at Hawkins House Bed and Breakfast. I arrived in town during the trail rides, and all the lodging was full for the first night I was in town. Locals recommended I stay an extra day to let the traffic with horse trailers and raft trailers abate on the incredibly steep and winding roads. These roads have no shoulder, and I could clearly understand the caution. The helpful staff at the post office directed me to the B & B. When I arrived, they were full for the evening but offered a free spot to camp in the backyard and a room the following evening. I happily accepted. They invited me to breakfast the next morning, an incredibly delectable composition of peach French toast and bacon. (I haven’t eaten bacon for something like 15 years, but it was good that morning.)

I stayed with families several times, and often the meals they cooked at home were some of my favorite. Linda and Tom Collier in Halfway, OR, made an amazing salad of nearly everything harvested from their property: lettuces, beets, onions, eggs, and a variety of other vegetables. Jim & Julia in Lander, WY, made an egg scramble for dinner that we ate at their garden table, served with a side of garden-harvested greens. Delicious and delightful.

Company can also make for a stellar food experience. In Yellowstone, I rode with JC, a celiac. That was the one night I had dinner made on a cookstove. We spent a good hour in the little grocery store at Colter Bay to come up with a winning combination of veggies and protein to have with rice. The whole experience of shopping, cooking, and conversation made that meal tops.

In Riverside, WY, I had an incredible Greek omelet. The waitress asked, “How was your breakfast this morning?”
“It was incredible. That’ll get me 100 miles down the road.”
“That’s what we like to hear!”
And that’s the kind of breakfast I like, especially on a day I knew I’d be riding a century.

In Pueblo, CO, I met up with some friends of the family, and we went to dinner at the B Street Bistro. We sampled fried green avocadoes, brie en crote, salmon cakes, entrees, and dessert. Every element of that meal danced on my tongue, and set on a table of familiarity, each flavor and forkful came buoyed on a little raft of love.

Lots of times, that’s how bike bliss feels. Everything sparkles, and I love everything, even the dirt clods on the side of the road look beautiful.

* What are some of the trails’ highlights in terms of natural beauty? Historical interest? Cultural value?

Most of my favorite spots of natural scenic beauty were lush, mountainous areas: Scenic Riverways, MO, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, WY, Rocky Mountains, CO, Appalachian Mountains, VA.

The trail travels some incredible arid and desert areas, which have just as much scenic appeal for those who appreciate austere environments. For me, these places also struck me for their historic and cultural interest. The Oregon Trail crosses the Continental Divide in Wyoming through desolate landscape that has just as little settlement today as it did in the 1840s. Pedaling through the area on my relatively high tech bike with high tech gear made me appreciate the hardships early pioneers endured to reach the fertile valleys of Oregon. I had an experiential sense for what traveling that area must have been like and a keener understanding of how the dream of Oregon’s green must have kept hope alive.

The TransAm travels much of the same trail that Lewis and Clark journeyed with the Corps of Discovery. In this area, I particularly appreciated the opportunity to consider the American Indian peoples who lived comfortably in these mountains, valleys, and plains long before any settlers arrived. Mostly, I had an opportunity to consider what “history” means and whose story it is.

* What have you been learning about the U.S. that you didn’t know before by undertaking this journey? And about yourself?

The U.S. is a big place. Pedaling it, I know now. Of the ribbon I traveled in this country, I have seen it, smelled it, heard it, tasted it, touched it. For me, there is something singular about knowing how much energy it takes to cross the Rockies, Ozarks, Appalachians, and the great flats in the mid-west. I have a new appreciation for the roadbuilding that makes it possible, too.

Personally, this trip has taught me that there are more commonalities among us than differences. I reconnected to my country; it’s an incredible place, and I come home to being American. I’ve also learned that, when I give it space and opportunity to navigate, my heart has an incredible sense of direction.

I got a request for a short blog post.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my two young cousins, Emily and Laura. They completed their second day back from school this afternoon, and we’re debriefing. Laura’s coloring a mosaic, Emily’s reading, and me…I’m typing.

I think I left you all hanging in Fredericksburg. I made it to Washington, DC, without a whole lot to report. I started my ride back at Hyperion Espresso where I plugged in to the wifi with a cup of tea. I made a motel reservation for two nights since arranging a home stay with friends or warmshowers folks doesn’t work very well on short notice on holiday weekends. Everyone goes to the beach.

Having internet connected myself with some concrete destination, I headed down the winding roads of Virginia with their scenic ups and downs. I landed in Mt. Vernon because of its proximity to the bike path and relative nearness to my next destination.

I arranged to meet a friend the following day in Silver Spring, MD for dinner. I put together a little bag of stuff with half a mind I was leaving early and would stop somewhere at a coffee shop and take in the sights of town. When I was a kid, we often commented about the Sunday drivers out, the people going slowly with no particular destination. Well, on a long holiday weekend, the Sunday riders were out also. I like seeing so much activity in the parks – walkers, cyclists of all abilities, picnickers, bird watchers, plein air painters. Well, the last I didn’t see, but I could imagine them there. I learned that one of the entertainments for people involves sitting at the end of the runway at National Airport to watch the planes take off.

The narrow and uneven paths that dogleg their way next to the Potomac kept me at a fairly slow pace. I had my own Sunday driver mode. I discovered my handlebars were loose. I stopped in Alexandria and found myself in a bike shop cluster. Mostly I wanted a bicycling map of the DC area, thinking of the one I picked up in May that lies quietly in a drawer of cycling maps back home.
“Can I help you?”
“Do you have a cycling map of the DC area?”
“No, we don’t have one. You should try the visitor’s center a couple of blocks up, they should have one.”
“Ok. Also, my handlebars are loose.”
He handed me an allen wrench, and I tightened them up. “You can keep that.”
“Thanks.”
The visitor’s center didn’t have any maps either nor did the bicycle rental shop I went by. I didn’t want to spend more time looking for a map. When I got back on the path, I saw a cyclist ahead who seemed to be moving at a fairly good pace and also appeared to know the paths. I followed him. Soon, he turned off. I picked up behind another cyclist and followed him, a good pairing that got me over the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Monument where I got all turned around trying to find the Rock Creek Trail. Unfortunately I found no other guides to help me through the trails ahead. I started to see some familiar landmarks though, a good sign. That meant I was getting close, right? Already my watch told me that I was going to be late, past the two-hour window we’d originally discussed. So much for proper timing. Honestly, I left the motel with no idea how many miles I was going. I had this idea it was “just over there.”

Through Rock Creek Park, Beach Drive closes to auto traffic on the weekends, and the place teemed with cyclists, runners, walkers, and picnickers. I saw a massive caterpillar on the road and turned around to take a picture of it. Right then a young boy ran over part of it. Oh no! I came up next to it, and another cyclist stopped, “Are you ok? Do you need help?”
“Thanks, I’m fine. I’m having a nature appreciation moment” and pointed to the caterpillar.
He looked down at the caterpillar and then carried on.
I watched it as I fumbled a bit with my camera wondering what effect the little bike would have on it. It still moved around. Just then, it bent to the side and discharged a jet of clear fluid.
“Oh, it’s not so ok.”
Two runners passed me, and the woman stopped to examine the caterpillar too.
“Wow, I’ve never seen a caterpillar that big before!”
The caterpillar was the size of a bratwurst, in fatness and length. Later, Laura produced a field guide of insects, and we learned it’s a Regal Moth and if it continued to live would metamorphose into a bright orange moth.

I continued into Silver Spring and arrived for dinner around 7, an hour after expected.
“You made it! How far did you come, 30 or 40 miles?”
“Ok.”
“What, you don’t know?”
“Nope. I don’t have a cycling computer that tells me these things. “

We had an awesome dinner, and I got a lift back to my motel. The next morning, we met for a ride around Clifton, a great Monday morning holiday ride up and down some relatively quiet country roads. We stopped in at a relative’s house and got a quick tour of wine making and boat restoration before wheeling through the closed town center of Clifton where the annual classic cars show filled the streets with glossy vintage cars and people, people, people.

My Uncle picked me up in the parking lot of the Workhouse, an old prison converted to art center. Once reunited with family, with whom I spent some time during the Pennsylvania cabin event, we went to Glen Echo, a historic amusement park. The National Park Service has been slowly restoring the Art Deco park which is home to a still functioning 1920s carousel. We all rode the carousel with me out front on an ostrich.

I needed to sleep, and eleven hours felt delicious. My dinner came with about three persons worth of salt in it, so I woke periodically throughout the night to hydrate, not little sips to moisten my lips but big glugging intakes of pure water. I drank a whole liter after two wakings and got up to fill the bottle again. Maybe it wasn’t just an overly salty dinner but a lot of sweating throughout the day of riding and everything else that came with reaching the end point of my cycling journey for this trip. Water restores all sorts of things.

Even though Virginia came with this promise of increased internet connectivity – it should, right, as I get closer and closer to the country’s heart and lizard brain – I found myself less connected in my chosen stops than I expected. I took that as a sign to focus on riding.

Given all the hype about hurricane Earl that seemed to blow itself out – I notice now the story is about why the media made such a fuss and mistake in touting it as an “Evil storm a-coming” when everyone’s having the time of their lives at the beach – I revised my riding plans one last time. Ellen drove me and my bike along the cycling route from Mechanicsville to Yorktown and then north across Virginia’s “necks” to the Northern Neck and the town of Callao.

Yorktown was a bit anticlimactic for me. Neat little town established in 1691. There are not many places in the U.S. that bear such an old time stamp. Most of the states in which I’ve lived haven’t been able to claim written dates much earlier than the 1840s. This is where we get into that weird thing about history and time again. People have lived on this land much longer than it’s taken white people to arrive with their systems of writing and ownership and values for prioritizing facts to take everything that had previously existed and erase it, erecting a flag in the sand and declaring, “Now the story begins!” All this time I’ve been going backwards, and I only just realized it. Yorktown symbolizes the end of the Revolutionary War. While it’s on the bike route, Ellen and I did not go through Jamestown – established 1609 – perhaps the time when Americans first started developing “parking.” For all the to-do in Virginia about 60% of the Civil War being fought in this state, I was a little surprised to find the TransAmerica Trail ending in a critical location for the birth of America. I shouldn’t be surprised. It seems obvious now that I’m writing it.

We stopped at the visitor’s center. You can’t even go to the gift shop without checking in at the front desk. I didn’t see anything about bikes standing there while someone in front of me got extensive directions to somewhere five feet away. I exaggerate.
“What can I help you with?”
“I don’t know. The sign says I need to check in here. Is there a place people go with their bikes, when they’re starting or ending riding across country?”
“Oh, you mean when they go to California…”
“Oregon. The TransAmerica Trail. Yes.”
“We have these biking tour routes and recommend people ride here. If you want something else, maybe check in at the bike shops.”

At least when I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge last summer, I knew where the cheering squad was supposed to be (and there were a lot of tourists around to stand in for the squad…the set comes with extras). In Yorktown, everything turns into twisty cow paths. No sign for bikes that I saw.

We drove down to the waterfront.
“Look, bikes!”
About four loaded touring bikes leaned against the wall outside the hotel.
“Does anyone live in this town?”
We parked and looked for a place to eat. We went to the Yorktown Pub, had an ok lunch and watched people out enjoying the day on the white sandy beach. We took a few pictures. Ellen was out on an adventure herself.

“Shall we continue on?”
“Let’s.”

All the biking directions sent us back to Williamsburg to cross onto the Middle Neck. With the bridge right there in Yorktown, we figured we could shorten the distance without having to backtrack. Both of us were curious how connecting from Yorktown to the Tidewater-Potomac bicycling route would be.
The bridge didn’t seem like it would be particularly friendly to bicycles. Passenger vehicles paid $2 to cross the bridge, motorcycles $.85, but there wasn’t anything for a bicycle and on the other side of the toll plaza it looked like bikes would get squished in the traffic anyway. Maybe that’s how they dealt with them…All bikes wait there, we’ll deal with you later. It’s probably a lot easier than all that but I could see how invisibly or infrequently bicycles came through here.

We crossed several bridges, gigantic rivers. The rivers I know are small in comparison to the wide mouths of the major collectors. The Rappahannock seemed more like a huge lake to me, emptying into the massive expanse of the Chesapeake Bay.
“The Chesapeake is huge, like the ocean.” Even though I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, I grew up with memories firmly rooted in the landlocked west. Even in Oregon, I forget I’m only an hour’s drive away from the Pacific Ocean….or what now is about a five hour’s bike ride.

We arrived in Callao about 4 p.m. I had originally thought of riding from Callao to Montross for the night. I didn’t want to start at that hour.
“Let’s look for the lodging. There should be some in town.”
“I’ll take you wherever you want. If you want to go to Montross we can do that too.”
“Oh, there it is.” I pointed to the motel sign. “I’ll see what they have.”
I jumped out of the truck and went into the office.
“Do you have room for one for tonight?”
“Just tonight?”
“Yes.”
“We do.”
“Do you have wifi?”
“No, this place is ancient.”
“Ancient?! That’s fine.”
“Do you want to look at the room first?”
“No, that’s ok. I’ll go with it. Thanks.”

I unloaded my bike into the room and bid a sweet farewell to Ellen. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with her exploring Virginia.
“So much for having worn my cycling clothes. Well, a good way to get in the mood.”
I explored Callao a little bit hunting for the restaurant in town and the grocery store. I couldn’t decide what I wanted. Next to the motel, an “all things” shop had quite a collection of bicycles for sale, one a red vintage looking cruiser for what I envisioned was about $234 on the price tag I never looked at. While none of the bikes had a bright shine on them or looked newer than ten years old, I would consider this a fine rural amenity. I wondered if they were a fleet of rental bikes at first. The sign on the road said “Callao Chamber of Commerce.” “Maybe.” Some other sign on the building indicated you could get antiques or other wares and odds and ends there. Whatever you need, bikes, beds, business. “Now that’s layering.”

The next morning dawned overcast, moist, with a light breeze. “This is the hurricane?” Earl, if it was Earl, gave me a day of good, cool riding. I pedaled through mostly flat and pretty countryside. I never left settled areas, but sometimes there would be a church or a cluster of more than one building. Fields of soybeans and burned corn bordered the roads. They hadn’t seen rain out this way for a long time and the corn just cooked as it grew until it quit growing. Many of the soybeans fared no better.
“The farmers lost their crops this year. It’s been so hot.”
I could see the evidence even on this uncharacteristic day…the one day all summer when the place wasn’t searing.
Ellen told me, “One year corn, two years of soy.” I guess I was wrong about that four-year crop rotation cycle.
“This isn’t Earl. It’s just a tease.”

I passed through Montross around 9 a.m. The next full-service town lay about 40 miles down the road in Fredericksburg. I passed by Stratford Hall, a National Historic Landmark and family home of the Lees. I assume that’s Lee, as in Robert E Lee. Nearby, a national monument marks the birthplace of George Washington. I rode by considering the 1700s-ness of coastal Virginia. I’m in the thick of history out here riding King’s Highway, passing into King George County and asking myself to remember a lot of historical information I had to take in grade school and didn’t much care to remember.
I passed by a bright green snake on the road.
“That was still alive!”
I turned around and went back to find it. This snake was easy to spot on the road, it didn’t blend in at all, but it would have looked like a piece of grass just off the road. There wasn’t much of a place to stop safely on the road, but it wasn’t such a busy road. I hoped the snake wouldn’t get run over as people passed around me, and when I left I hoped again it wouldn’t get run over. Faking like a piece of grass in the middle of the road wasn’t a particularly effective self-preservation strategy, but I’m not sure I could have convinced the snake otherwise. I should have picked it up, but I didn’t thinking that it would just venture back out on the road to warm up.
As I was in the midst of framing the snake and watching it fake a slight grassy sway in the wind, a noisy black car pulled up from the direction ahead of me.
“Hey, you’re friend up there is stopped with a flat.”
I looked up at two black-clad late teen looking guys who probably smoked a lot of cigarettes and consumed other substances that had a deteriorating effect on them. “My friend?”
“Oh, are you by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s someone up there with a flat.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Or maybe you’ll like each other.” And away they drove kind of laughing.
I guessed they probably hadn’t stopped to chat with the cyclist up ahead of me.

I left the snake there in the road and pedaled along. At the next intersection, I came upon a cyclist on the side of the road with his bike upside down.
“Hi. Can I help you with anything?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a spare tube?”
“What do you need?” He had a few tubes out already.
“My spare tubes have the Scrader valve, and I can get them to fit through the hole in my wheel.”
“I have a spare you could have. It’s going to be smaller than you need though. Did you try patching the puncture?”
“I think there’s something wrong with the valve. This is a little bent.”
I looked at the tube. “Sometimes they get a little bent. This is ok. It’s only a problem if air leaks out of the valve.” I handed him my spare tube, still in its box, fresh, new. I took my right cycling glove off and tried to feel for a leak in the tube. I grabbed my pump and filled it fuller to see if I could get a hit on a minor leak. Nothing. Part of me really wanted to find it and patch his tube and send him on his way.
“Sometimes its easiest to do this in a sink, you can find the puncture easier, particularly if it’s really small. It’s tough to feel them in the breeze like this. We could put this one back in and fill it up, but I fear you might flat again further down the way.”
“Let’s put your tube in, and I’ll get it sorted out at the next bike shop.”
“The closest shop is Fredericksburg.”
“I just came from there. I’m not going back.”
I shrugged. “Well, I stopped in this place Callao last night. It doesn’t show they have a bike shop, but there was a guy there with lots of bikes. You might be able to get a tube there.”
“Do you mind helping me fix this? I meant to take a bike maintenance class before I left, but I didn’t. I was hoping the iPad would show me what to do, but I’d like to learn.”
“Ok.”
A couple more cyclists came up with light bikes and not much gear. “Do you need help?”
“We have it covered. Thanks.”
They were out “lapping Virginia” and had questions for us. Took them a while to understand that we weren’t riding together and that I was there assisting him.
Meanwhile we’d been getting to know a bit about one another through the process of dealing with the tube. He lives in Ireland and works “abroad” mostly at five different hospitals in Scotland “making them work more efficiently, helping sick people get better faster.” He seemed a bit like an investment banker to me and spoke with more of a British accent than an Irish one. Maybe he was from Belfast. I didn’t ask.
“I used to trade equity. That sucked the soul out of me. I had to stop.”
Funny, it’s not the first time I’ve heard that. He was in the States for two weeks and bought a whole kit of a bike for this ride to Green Valley (or was it Green Field?). I hadn’t heard of the place, so it didn’t stick. “Do you ride much at home?”
“I ride T4s. If I have a problem, there are hundreds of people there. How is it being out so long?”
“I haven’t been riding very much the last couple of weeks.” Forget the fact that I loved riding in the west. Even all that time in the flats wasn’t terrible. It was interesting in its way, but I guess I did get tired from too much “work.” That’s my own doing though, and I can’t complain about it. Good information for next time.
“I don’t think my pump works.”
“Usually you can just flip the inside around and it’ll work.” I unscrewed the top, but it didn’t look like that was how it was set up. I didn’t bother much further than that with the pump.
I set about switching the tubes. “You got the metal out, made sure there wasn’t anything else causing the puncture?”
“Yes.”
I took the tire off the wheel, wiped the grass off the wheel. I pumped up the tube and set it in the tire, put the valve through the hole in the wheel, and started seating the tire.
“I always have a hard time on this last little bit getting the tire over the rim without any tools.” I turned the wheel around and pressed up on the tire and it went easily over the rim. Maybe because that’s a tiny tube in there?
“Here, you pump it up.”
I put my stuff back together. I felt fine giving him my spare tube. There was a bike shop in Fredericksburg, but I was ok risking a ride into DC without a spare. I have new tires on front and rear, puncture resistant. I didn’t get a flat the whole ride into St. Louis with the tread on my tires totally shredded through glass and alligators and who knows what else.
“Could you help me put it on too?”
“Sure.”
I held the derailleur while he worked on getting the quick release bar into the notches on the frame.
“It’s stuck on the brakes.”
“There’s a little thing here. You squeeze the brakes together and lift that out.”
We got the tire in, brakes reattached.
“Give it a ride around make sure everything’s in working order.”
He went for a much longer ride than I anticipated, but I suppose that was good. I wasn’t sure how that little tube was going to work in his big tire, but it’s what we had to work with. Looked like it would be ok.
“Thanks a million.”
“No problem.”
“What’s your name?”
“Heidi. And yours?”
“Jeremy.”
“Jeremy?” That didn’t sound very Irish.
“No, Dermot.”
I obviously misheard him the first time. “Oh. Another Dermot. With two ‘t’s?”
“Dermot only has one ‘t,’ but lots of people seem to think it has two.”
“That Irish couple I was telling you about, his name is also Dermot with one ‘t.’”

I rode on down the road into Fredericksburg.
The route takes a path just outside of town. I had to stop a few times to figure out how to get into town. I ended up in a strip mall parking lot googling lodging. It didn’t seem like there were many options in town and none that seemed nearby. I looked for something close to downtown. I looked on the map for recommendations. Colonial Motel. That sounds about what I’m looking for.
I finally crossed into downtown and got a little turned around with all the one ways streets followed up with clear signage on the sidewalks that said “No Bicycles on Sidewalks.” Finally I got on a two-way street with not much traffic and paralleled the road I wanted to be on, Princess Anne. The street ended at 17th, and I wanted to be at 19th. Happily, Princess Anne St became a two way where I met it. I rode past the Colonial Inn.
“Uh, I don’t think so.” It had all sorts of remodeling debris on the porch. Across the street was a boarded up convenience store. Next to the Colonial Motel was the Relax Inn, a tidy and freshly painted complex that looked much nicer. I pulled up with my bike and walked into the office. Unlike every other place I’d been, this office wasn’t much bigger than a phone booth or porta-potty and had what seemed to be a bullet proof glass window with a tiny pass under. I felt a bit creeped out by it.
“How much is a room?”
“How many persons?”
“Just one.”
“How many nights?”
“Just tonight.”
“May I see some ID?”
I looked at the sign posted on the window. It had rules for the place. You couldn’t rent a room unless you were at least 21. Struck me that they get a lot of hourly rentals. A card came back to me from under the window. I looked at it but couldn’t tell how much the room was. It looked like $65. Even the man’s writing had an east Indian accent. I supposed $65 for a room seemed reasonable for getting close to DC. I wasn’t sure. “Do you have wifi?”
“No wifi. May I have a credit card. That’ll be $45.”
$45 was much better than I thought. I could live without wifi for the night.
I signed the credit slip. “Is it a non-smoking room?”
I couldn’t tell what he said. Either all the rooms were non-smoking or you could smoke in any of them. He wasn’t exactly engaging or a bundle of information, so I let it go.
I hefted my bike over the tall curb. The place didn’t seem particularly accessible anywhere. I opened the door and a waft of smoking room hit me. “I guess he said all rooms are smoking.” The tidy and freshly painted outside of the motel cloaked a seedy inside. I went into the room not sure if I would stay. No mold grew on the floor. The A/C worked. The towels had no stains and weren’t threadbare. The bedspread had only one cigarette burn in it and the sheets had no stains. I pulled back the cover to see if any roving black spots appeared on the sheets. No. If I didn’t look at the walls and didn’t touch anything (walls, furniture, light switches) it would be ok. Looked like some rambunctious teens had descended on the place or maybe some people so drunk they couldn’t quite stand up. A little paint on the inside would have gone a long way.

Eventually I took a shower and decided to go out for dinner and wifi, finding a spot I could hang out until it got dark.
I went to the Visitor’s Center and immediately a man came up and started talking to me about my bike and how he loves to fix them up. He looked a bit large for someone who rides much, but looks can be deceiving.
“Do you own a bike shop?”
“No.” He proceeded to detail how he’d found these really expensive bikes and gotten them for a steal. “I have 70 bikes.”
I’d locked my bike to what I guess was a horse hitching post. When he got absorbed in petting the dog of a woman who walked by, I went into the Visitor’s Center.
“Can you help me get oriented to town? I’m looking for a place to get dinner and wifi. They don’t have to be the same place.”
I got some good suggestions all along the street where I was.
“How safe is this town for bikes?”
“Oh, that man there. We called the cops on him but we can’t really make him go away. Where are you staying?”
“By the Colonial Motel.”
“Oh, did you do that by mistake?”
“Kind of.”
I was appreciative that she thought I picked a bad part of town to stay, but I wasn’t about to spend extra money on a Marriott. Mostly I didn’t want to move all my stuff again, and I certainly didn’t want to go back into that little sky blue compartment with the bullet proof glass and poor communication.

I unlocked my bike and walked down the street with it. I wanted to get far away from the creepy bike guy, but I was also looking for a place to lock my bike. I had noticed the signs keeping bikes off the sidewalks, but it seems Fredericksburg has done a pretty good job of keeping bikes out of their downtown, period. They don’t have a single bike rack. U.S. Bicycle Route 1 goes through town, and there is a bike shop right at the entry to town. That was a good sign, and they had a few bike racks there, but that’s the only place in all of downtown. The scary bike guy rode past me, and I found a place to lock my bike to a “Historic Downtown” sign. My only other option would be to lock to a streetlight, but I don’t have a cable lock, the only thing that would be big enough to go around one.

Oh Fredericksburg.

“What kind of things do you like to see?” Ellen wanted to take me sightseeing.
“Gardens. Places with historic interest, but I suppose that doesn’t narrow things down here. I like ‘places’ as different from ‘spaces.’ I don’t know, places to people watch or where there’s activity. Art.” I couldn’t articulate what I found fascinating on my ride. I wasn’t sightseeing in traditional senses, but I was taking in a lot – meeting people, having conversations, exploring the little towns. Mostly, I have no plan. I drift through a place and see where I end up – see what I see along the way. Sometimes that means I don’t see much, other times I do. For example, a train yard might not be a place one would consider sightseeing, but if I went there, I would turn it into an opportunity to do that. In some ways, I like the less defined spaces. The photo ops and points of interest are much less defined than they are elsewhere, especially in interpreted areas.

Ellen likes flowers and gardens too. We went first to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. We chanced upon a glass art installation exhibition to go along with our plant appreciation. We pretty much started in the conservatory where they cultivate a showy display of orchids. Oh were they blooming! The grounds came with full variety. We wandered through the expanded rose garden, through the quiet Japanese garden, and about a formal entertaining garden punctuated by a massive gingko tree. From there we strolled through the children’s garden where an ecstasy of toddlers shrilled in the excitement of the spray-play area on that 100 degree afternoon. To conclude our tour of the children’s area, we walked the ambling ramp into the tree house, a large, fully-accessible structure complete with tree stumps of varying heights to allow full views of the reflecting ponds even for the shortest of tots.

The Garden site used to be home to the local wheelmen’s club back in the 1890s. To commemorate the wheelmen, a high wheeler – a penny farthing as many call them today, or the ‘ordinary’ as they were known in the late 19th-century – has been installed in a bed. Today, with the glass art, “longfellows” played in alien-like charades about the wheels going nowhere fast but everywhere at once. Not too far from this spot, U.S. Bicycle Route 1 follows segments of Monument Avenue in Richmond. For all the history in Virginia, it shouldn’t surprise me that the state is the only one in the Union thus far to have two U.S. Bicycle routes. Certainly the state must have been a showcase cycling area during the cycling craze of the 1880s and 1890s. Along with the TransAmerica Trail winding through the state, Virginia is home to significant attempts to establish intercity bicycle travel in the U.S.

Ellen and I ventured out the following day into the heat to take in more of Richmond’s unique places. We headed downtown to the state capitol building. Adjacent to the capitol building, the governor’s residence stands – a National Historic Landmark and the longest in continuous use state executive’s residence. Across the street, we went into the old city hall, a gothic structure ornately designed and now maintained from tip to tail. Inside the capitol, we found the rotunda with George Washington prominently featured in the center with the six other U.S. Presidents from Virginia gracing the bust alcoves surrounding him.

We concluded our tour of Richmond with a long exploration of Maymount Park. This lavish residence and grounds, home of the Dooleys, became a Richmond park in the mid 1920s because they produced no heirs. Mr. Dooley, trained as a lawyer, went to work following the civil war reconstructing the railroads and became a major player in rejoining the north to the south, enabling the transport of raw materials north and manufactured goods south. We walked first through the Italian gardens, then down the hill and along the cascading waterfall into the Japanese gardens. Around we went and saw a black bear trying to escape the heat in a rocky alcove. We toured the house, full of small and large objects from Tiffany, not least of which is a two-story stained glass window. I preferred the more modest leaf sculpture by Tiffany in the library, which was decorated in eclectic Art Nouveau style. We wrapped up our visit of this place with a stop at the river otter exhibit where we managed to catch a few glimpses of these playful creatures through the narrow viewing window accessible to those of us who didn’t make it into the exhibit before the doors closed for the day.

Even though it’s been hot and steamy in Virginia, hurricane Earl’s coming to the coast. I planned to ride out to Yorktown and then north along the bay following a bike route into DC. Given concern over weather effects from the storm, I spent the evening with Ellen revising plans and figuring out how I could head landward about the time the hurricane would affect the coastal areas. We have a plan, and I have about three days of riding ahead of me.

I could hear Dermot in my mind, ever optimistic and the champion of keeping riders’ spirits up. “You’ll do it. Just over that hill then it’s a nice stop in Troutdale. Think how much satisfaction you’ll have from making it through here.”
If it was just a matter of nine days and I only had to make it to Yorktown, for sure.

Mary had a different approach to the hills.
“They’re fine in the morning. In the afternoon, I’ll hitch a ride up the last big one.”
“Does it take long for you to hitch a ride?”
“No.”
“How do you get people to stop?”
“I take my helmet off and put it on the ground. If people think you’re having a problem with your bike, they’ll stop.”
Later I got an email from her, “I got a ride up the big hill on a vehicle carrying mountain bikes and people up to a trail. Cost me $10, money well spent.”

Both Mary & Dermot had rented a car in Kentucky and driven to Pennsylvania and back to see their daughter.
“It’s not too expensive depending on how many miles you can drive in one day.”
“What did you do with your bikes?”
“We left them at the shop where we rented the car. They’ll even come and pick you up if you’re not more than 20 or 30 miles away.”

Once I finally settled into my room with a good wifi connection, I got on the Greyhound site to find out what their requirements for traveling with bicycles were. Seems like it should be much easier to travel with a bicycle than it winds up being. It looked like a couple of different charges, none of which seemed outrageously expensive. Given my experience with Amtrak, I still wanted to call and find out what the ticketing folks had to say. Would they let me get on the bus with a bike at a small stop?

Before I even bought a ticket I called.
“A bicycle must go in a box. It’s fifteen dollars for a box.” I thought he said there was a handling fee too, but he whizzed through that and wanted to get me to the point of buying the ticket. I arranged for a ticket to Richmond, which also cost me $6 to get. I’m not sure if the only way to avoid that $6 fee is to buy the ticket right at the station. I’m sure they charge for an online purchase too.
“If I understand you correctly,” there was some doubt in my mind because he spoke quickly with a heavy accent, “I take care of everything with my bike at the station.”
“That is correct. Here is your confirmation number. You will need this to get your ticket.”
He told me the number, and I wrote it down as he talked. Then he repeated it. I repeated what I had written back to him. “Is that correct?”
“Yes. We recommend you arrive one hour before your scheduled departure.”

We ended the conversation. I got on the website and looked at where the Greyhound offices were. Dallas. Hmmm. He was a kind of fast-talking city guy. I wonder if he has a clue about traveling with bikes.

I put my concerns aside. He made it sound like it would be easy enough to travel with a bicycle, as if it were baggage. I wanted to believe him. While the bicycle is a fundamental part of my traveling kit – at least on this journey – no one seems to consider it simply baggage. The closest I’ve been able to get it to baggage terms is “luggage wheels.” It’s considerably easier to move my gear around wheeling it on the bike than carrying it. Unfortunately, as a non-folding version of luggage wheels, I cannot conveniently fold my bike and stow it in the overhead bin during travel.

I planned to show up two hours before the bus departure just in case there were any issues with the bike. I figured that would be ample time to work something out. That put my arrival at the station at 8:25 a.m., a reasonable time to be somewhere on a Monday morning.

Up in the dark of morning, I wrote before packing up my gear, time slipping away from me as it does. Breakfast at the motel came with fewer than usual options – donuts and bagels only – but it was more than nothing and bagels travel well. I made one for the bus ride and wrapped it in a napkin. Twenty minutes before I wanted to be at the station I started hurriedly packing my gear.
I need to reorganize locations of things.
Everything I want to have with me needs to go in one bag. The rest of the stuff goes in the other bag. Don’t forget to put tools on the top of the “have with me” bag.

I rode to the station, dismounted at the door and wheeled my bike in to the counter.
“Hi. I have a reservation for this morning’s bus.”
“We don’t usually let people bring bikes in here.”
“I need to pack it up and bring it with me.”
“These floors are tile. If you break one, you bought it.”
Such warm reception. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.
“I’ll need your confirmation number.”
I fished the number out of my traveling paper pile and started to read it to her.
“I have to wait for my computer to get to that screen. It takes it a little while to get started.” She stared blankly at the screen for a seemingly long time. After long last she was ready for the number, and I read it to her.
“What was it again?”
I read it again.
She read it back to me. A number was transposed.
We tried again.
“I don’t know. I can’t print this ticket. The system says it’s already been printed.”
“You can’t look it up by my name?”
“They don’t give me that kind of access. I’m just a ticketing agent.”
“Ok. What do I need to do?”
“I don’t deal with online reservations.”
“I didn’t make the reservation online. I called them.”
“I don’t know. Maybe the confirmation number is wrong. The only thing I can think you can do is call them back.”
“Ok.” I called Greyhound customer service again. A woman with a different kind of thick accent answered the phone. At the beginning, I had to guess what she was saying. She read me the confirmation number. I had an extra number written down. I corrected it on my paper and handed it to the ticketing agent.
On the phone, the customer service agent asks, “Can I help you with anything else?”
“Yes, I’d like you to wait until we put the number in the system to make sure it’s the right ticket while I have you on the phone.”
There was a moment of dead air time. If there’s nothing else, thank you for calling Greyhound.”
“Wait. I’d like you to stay on the line while we check the confirmation number.” The ticketing agent was looking blankly at the screen again.
“I have to get back to that screen. It takes a little while.” I couldn’t quite believe her system had so little capability and worked so slowly.
On the phone I hear, “I can’t hold on the line longer than 30 seconds.”
“Help me understand. You just asked me if there was anything else you could help me with, and I asked you to do something. Even though, as a customer, I asked you to wait on the line, you still cannot?”
“That’s correct. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Yes. I’m traveling with a bike, and I show up here at the station, and they say I can’t bring my bike with me because they don’t have bike boxes. The person I talked to last night when I made my reservation made it sound easy, like there wouldn’t be any problem.”
“You always need to call the station ahead of time to find out what services they offer.”
“He never said that.”
“You always need to call the station.”
“Ok fine. I’m a little frustrated that I call Customer Service because I need some assistance and people don’t tell me the information I need and now that I’m asking for some help, you say you can’t give it to me. I wonder, if I just keep talking to keep you on the line if that will suffice until the ticketing agent brings up the ticket?”
“You have to have something you need help with otherwise I can’t stay on the phone.”
“Forget it. Bye.” I hung up. Apparently having an issue with customer service isn’t a valid enough reason to be talking with them.

“It takes a while to print the ticket.”
I waited quietly, and she handed the ticket to me. “What about my bike?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“This ticket is non-refundable? So, if I miss the bus, I’m out of luck.”
“Let me look at it. Yes.”
I don’t know how I ended up with a non-refundable ticket to begin with. No one gave me an option for anything else ever.
“There is a bike shop in town. They may have a box.”
I called them a few times and no one answered. “I want confirmation from the bike shop that they have a box before I ride down there. If they do, I don’t have any way to get back here.”
“I can’t help you with that.”
She gave me directions to the bike shop. I had 45 minutes. I rode down to the shop. Closed Sunday and Monday. Nice. I rode back to the bus stop and looked in the phone book at the pack and ship phone number. Number disconnected. I went to the grocery store around the corner and got a map of Virginia and looked to see where the nearest Amtrak station was. I noticed a car rental stop across the street.

I decided to wait for the bus and see what would happen. After 10:30 I could move ahead with other plans if needed.
The ticketing agent came out to me.
“I wanted to let you know that the bus is going to be late. I talked to the driver though and told him about you. He said he had a compartment open and you could put your bike on and take care of boxing it later.”
“Thanks.”
I relaxed after that. The bus was 30 minutes late, but the driver was incredibly nice.
“We can put your bike on, and when we get to Roanoke, we’ll get it boxed up for you.”

I got on the bus. Yay.
45 minutes down the road we stopped at another station for a food break and for some other passengers to transfer. I stayed on the bus. The only lonely in there. Eleanor called me then. “Are you coming in today?”
“Yes, I am. I’ll probably be in Richmond around 6 p.m. this evening.”
“Great. I’ll let Art know. He can pick you up.”
“Thanks!”

An hour and a half later, the bus pulled into Roanoke, where the station seemed a mass of confusion. A young guy in front of me was trying to do some complicated ticket switch over with his sister and when he finally settled on the proper ticket didn’t have enough cash. I stood in line waiting, hoping the bus wouldn’t leave without me.
“I need to box my bike.”
“That’ll be 15 dollars. Do you have cash?”
“Not that much.”
“There’s an ATM right across the way there. You need to take the front wheel off.”
“I’ll take my bike apart first. I have to take the rack off it also.”
The station was abuzz. It wasn’t just that they could easily put my bike in a box either. The didn’t have a box and were going to need to make one out of other boxes they had.
I got some cash, came back, and I was the last one to get on the bus, watching them hurriedly trying to tape some boxes together to cover my bike. I would have felt better keeping the whole thing in one piece and putting it back on without the cardboard. This seemed like a great way for it to get damaged or parts lost.
It all worked out in its way. I got on the bus and managed to get all the other parts squashed in the overhead bins, stowed under the seat, and squirreled away in an empty space by the guy across the aisle. Come to find out, I sat down next to a woman who’d lived in Eugene for six years and who’d worked as a bike messenger for CAT, delivering Eugene Weeklys and other items on the cargo bikes.

In Richmond, I got off the bus with what I thought were all of the stray pieces from my bike until the driver threw my lock out on the ground. So friendly. I walked around the bus and found my bike in a mess of cardboard. I ripped the boxes open to get my bike out. The end of my quick release bolt was missing. Bummer.
“You need to do something with those boxes.”
“Ok. What should I do with them?”
“There’s a dumpster over there.”

Art showed up just then, took my bike and started wheeling it toward his truck. When I picked up the boxes, I found the end of the quick release bolt. Yay.

With that, I determined that Greyhound must almost never get people traveling with bikes, and given what our journey was like, I can see why.

“How you shift them bikes?”
“The shifters are in the brakes.”
“How long you been doing this?”
“I started in mid-June. She started in late June.”
“What y’all need out here is your own lane. I wish they’d put one in on that road. We work with the coal, making sure the trucks are loaded and moving. There ain’t no room on that road. You can’t ride those bikes with them skinny tires in the gravel on the side of the road.”
Saturday. I wondered why coal trucks still ran on Saturdays, but maybe they start early and end early.
“Virginia sure is pretty though. You should see it when the leaves turn color. That’s the prettiest time of year. It’s really pretty in the winter with the snow too. I’m a motorcycle rider.”
“You ride your motorcycle out here in the winter?”
“That’s one way to do it. Doubt you’re gonna be riding a bicycle out here then.”
“I’ve thought about getting a motorcycle. I went some places that made me think that would be a good way to go.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“It gets all quiet and covers up all the junk. Looks so clean and pretty with a blanket of snow all over it.”
There were a few Adopt-a-Highway signs, but not many. I noticed a lot of trash on the roadside, mostly bottles containing drink. Several of them still had what looked like their original contents inside. Why do people throw those out? Or, how do they get there? Some of the bottles looked like they’d been discarded after more utilitarian purposes. I’m sure some of them had fluids of human origin inside, but I don’t like thinking about that too much.

Once upon a time I remember someone saying that archaeologist love trash. Trash tells a story. What is this story of the drink bottles and the broken glass? I learn something particular about the people who leave them as clues to their story. I learn about these people even though they are not there. Absence signifies. But these are a particular kind of people who I learn about from their leavings. What about the ones who don’t leave clues? What is their story?

I could be enamored with leavings. They prompt us to tell stories. History is that.

I like the buildings as leavings too. I like when people care for them, but I also like observing how nature reclaims structures. Every bit of material comes from the earth. We process and refine to organize certain elements or substances into like piles and then we form those piles into shapes. Later, we arrange the shapes into a pattern and structure. The degree to which we keep these structures maintained prevents their reorganization and subsequent reintegration by nature. Saturday morning yard maintenance reestablishes the line. In other places, the line no longer exists.

Plants, lichen, mosses – they all move slowly but with decided purpose. Maybe not all slowly. Friend Sarah tells us that kudzu, that delicious creeping vine, moves a mile a minute. What about kudzu? Is it in its own economic boom time, creating a sprawling settlement pattern? Will it grow so fast and furiously that it chokes itself out, using to excess the resources that have helped it advance so quickly? Will it soon learn new ways of transporting itself as an evolutionary solution to unsustainable growth patterns? What can our advocacy movements learn from kudzu? Does its rhetoric compel? What inspires and drives its motion? Is this a premiere example of active transportation?

Heidi, where are you?
I don’t know. I’m right here, lost in time and space. I exist. Something tells me I exist. I have this bicycle, and I pedal it. Like the kudzu, I move a mile a minute. Hah! I feel. I feel my body move against my bicycle seat. My tolerance is low for that sensation. I feel my legs move the pedals. Somehow, keep them moving, that’s how we get anywhere. I feel time. It’s still ok. Maybe time is better than ok these days. My internal clock sends a signal through me. “Now.” Now what? Where am I? Speed equals time over distance. How far? How much time? Wait, if it’s miles per hour, doesn’t that mean Speed equals Distance over Time? I stand still. My mind races.

I need to finish this journey. My destination is Washington, DC. I have a stack of writing to attend to. Now that all my physical pieces are together, my mental space has become scattered. Every time I move, I scatter my thoughts afield, like the drink bottles along the highway. I want to focus, clean up my mental highway and leave no drink bottle debris like the cyclists pedaling from one water stop to the next, refilling and refueling.

I turn off route.
What are you doing?
I need a ride.
To where?
Forward. I need to write. I need to practice. I need to finish pedaling. The pedaling part, for this trip, it’s basically done. I have my information. Now I must focus on the other part of this project.

Here. I have learned this. Attractive bicycle routes follow scenic roadways and wind through rural areas. In the east, the plentiful roads and ancient mountains accentuate the turns and curves. These journeys support a slower pace of life. We travel more slowly. A bicycle suits the pace.
“We hear so much about bicycle projects in cities, but there’s very little work being done, that I know of, on intercity bicycle travel.”
“It’s one of those chicken and egg things. We don’t really know how many people travel by bicycle from city to city. And, because not much infrastructure exists for it, we know less about what the real demand is. If we want to fund bicycle projects to make intercity travel more accessible, we have to have some evidence for the existing and real demand. Additionally, we have to make it easier for people to reach these places to ride – to get on and off the route. For example, how are you getting your bike back to San Francisco?”
“I’m flying back, but I’m going to ship my bike. I flew with my bike once, but I won’t do it again. It’s expensive, and if something happens to the bike, it’s not insured on the plane. If I ship it, it’s insured. This is an ok way to go if you don’t need your bike right away. At the end of the trip, it will be ok to wait a little while.”
“What did you do with your bike when you flew from Durango?”
“I left it with someone in town. I was really glad it was still there when I got back.”
“How do you travel at home with your 50-mile commute?”
“I bike to train to bike.”
I forgot to ask if the bike went on the train or if there are two bicycles involved.

I think about the two weeks I waited to be reunited with my bike when I shipped it from St. Louis. I chose to ship it because I couldn’t take it as checked baggage on my particular train route. My other option would have been to send it on a different train and pick it up at some time other than my arrival. Given the distance I would travel from the train station, adding another car trip to fetch the bicycle (since it would likely not be delivered closer to my destination) made little sense. Might as well ship it forward to a time and location when and where I would be. As things turned out, the bicycle was sent with “signature required” for delivery. Given various delays, my bike would be delivered when no one was around to receive it. To complicate matters further, because of the delivery location I couldn’t get my bike on either Sunday or Monday, not at the house, not at the main offices (wherever they were). So, I had to wait. And then, the train I wanted to take doesn’t run every day, so I had to wait another day for that to arrive.

Traveling in a car, we wouldn’t stand for these kinds of delays, even if we had major repairs we needed to make on our vehicle. I find them everywhere. Not that I move so fast pedaling, but sometimes I feel I could move my bike faster pedaling than waiting for my bike to make a journey without me. I set out to learn this kind of information. I had one more option to explore.

I departed from Mary and Dermot at Meadowview. I wanted to take a break, eat, evaluate my circumstances, and go no further away from the interstate than was necessary. If I left the interstate, I knew I’d be pedaling back to it.

“I’ll just ride up there until I can see that truck stop and then figure out how to get there.”
As I got up the hill, I saw a vehicle repair shop.
“I’ll go to the next exit. Not far, ¾ of a mile, and it looks like a college town. That’s promising.”
At the top of the exit ramp I could see nothing. I wasn’t sure how far the town was from the interstate. I sent a text.
“Ooh, a quick reply back.”
I called.
“What can I do to help? Is there anything I can do on the computer that would help?”
“Yeah. It would be nice to know how far this town is from the interstate.”
“Looks like it’s only a mile.”
“It’s a college town, it should have services, don’t you think?”
“That seems reasonable.”
“Ok. Let’s talk later after I get there.”

I rode into the town. College everywhere and people about, but not what I would consider a Sunday morning breakfast scene. I stopped at the post office looking at my google map of the town trying to guess where the commercial area might be. Someone pulled up to the post office and dropped a letter in the mail slot.
“Excuse me. Can you tell me if there’s anywhere to get breakfast in this town?”
“Hmmm. Well, there’s the college cafeteria. It’s that way. Or, if you go down the road to Glade, there’s a place there.”
She gave me directions to the main drag in Glade. I followed them until I got into Glade and found myself in a maze of roads, rail tracks, churches, and houses with no discernible commercial services. I looked at my google maps again and turned around in the direction of the business route. I found the downtown area and rode through it three times looking for something to be open. No luck. Sigh.
“Well, I’m in Glade Spring now, but there’s still nothing.”
“You’re a lot closer to where I was going to send you though. It looks like you can catch a Greyhound in Marion. It’s twenty miles up the road, less because you’re already in Glade.”
“Do they have services?”
“Yeah, it looks like at least five motels.”
“Gee, that’s a booming metropolis.”

I followed the directions to Marion but hadn’t gone but a few blocks when I spotted a grocery store. “Oh! Something is open!” I turned in and recharged from the morning ride and fueled up for the 15 miles to Marion. I took a few confused turns before I got on the right road and followed some beautiful country roads to the junction of Highway 11 and Interstate 81. Even with the interstate adjacent to Highway 11, the Highway was divided with two travel lanes in each direction. “Who would have thought? I get a lane to myself. That’s nice.”

I rolled into Marion, a town advertising its Main Street downtown and downtown historic district. I liked the look of it with some monstrous houses atop the hill in the heart of downtown. I stopped at a corner to evaluate my lodging options and noticed a fancy looking historic hotel across the street. Sounded expensive and I really wanted a place with no frills, just wifi. As it turned out, the wifi requirement sent me on a customer service journey too, and I wound up asking for a refund on the room I checked into and went next door to another motel that had an instant and reliable connection in a bigger room for less money. Odd how these things work out.