But as expected, when I awoke the next morning, I didn’t feel like doing any riding this day either. So, once again, the girls and I bid farewell, with Rebecca and Mia biking off bright and early and me returning to sleep in my luxurious indoor cot.

But then Mr. Jackson, father in the three-person family riding group along with his wife and 9-year old son, informed me – in a polite way – that they were leaving but that they couldn’t let me stay in the house or give me the key because it hadn’t been okayed with anyone for me to remain in the house, so I’d kindly need to vacate the premises so they could lock up and turn the key in.

So I was expelled from the house, which I wasn’t pleased about, though I understood their reasons. As they biked off, it started to rain. While the rain poured down the pavilion roof, I talked with The Guys, found out their goal was to end in Ash Grove that night and made it my goal to get us back into that house for the night.

After quite a few hours, with many leads and twists and turns, I found out who had the authority to grant us the key to the meeting house. Unfortunately, they were out of town on a fishing trip. Discouraged, I went to a local gas station and talked with the attendant about my plight. Her words were something to the effect of: “Well, honey, you came to right gas station cuz everybody knows everybody in this town and I used to be a bounty hunter.” She and a crack team of ol’ regulars sipping coffee inside went to work on how to get the key to the house for me.

By the end of the day, I had the key. Then The Guys all trickled into town. The first to arrive was Stephen, who I found sleeping in the same pavilion I’d passed out in a few days before. Then came Clay, The Gabe and Nick. They were all excited to sleep inside a building, with cots and a kitchen for cooking. We had a nice night enjoying the luxury of a stove and getting up to speed on the various narratives that had brought us all to this point.

We all woke up refreshed from a night spent indoors. We had breakfast together at Willy B’s – this being my third meal there, by now. Then, as the day started to heat up, we started down the road.

The landscape was thick with hills. The best way to deal with them, when you still have the energy, is to fly down the hill and use that momentum to get to the top of the next one. However, this system eventually breaks down as it takes more and more of your energy to get to the top of the hill so you have less energy to gain speed on the downhill so it takes more energy to get to the top of the hill so you have less energy…and so on.

But the scenery was pretty. Probably had the worst interactions with cars here since the roads are narrow and all of the uphills mean that cars have to *gasp* wait anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds before they can pass you.

Clay’s shifter broke midway through the day, making it even more of a trial for him. One size does not fit all when it comes to gears.

Really hot and really humid. Nick, Clay and I had lunch under a bridge for shade. We met up with Gabe and Stephen at a Subway in the next town over. We biked on, reaching Marshfield around 7pm, having only traveled a little over 40 miles that day.

Clay, Nick and Gabe wanted to stop for the night. I was now feeling pressure to keep going because of a commitment I’d made: my good friend, Klein, was going to join us at the KY border to ride across the state with us. I’d told him we’d be there in X days and we weren’t going to make it at this pace.

So now it seemed the inevitable would occur this night, the event we all knew would come one day was now upon us: The Great Fellowship would be broken. Clay, Gabe and Nick had more time set aside for the trip and thus were in no rush to finish whereas Stephen and I had two deadlines: finishing before school started and, more immediately, meeting up with Klein in the next few days.

We set up camp in a park in Marshfield and stayed up late into the night, reminiscing about the time our group had spent together. I’m really grateful to have had the pleasure and honor of riding with Clay, Gabe and Nick and wish them well in all their endeavors. Though it could never have been anticipated beforehand, their joining our trip was serendipitous and integral to the unfolding of the story.

Day 46: Ash Grove

0 miles

Like I said, when I finally hit 200 miles I collapsed in a gazebo in Ash Grove and just kind of laid there for a while. After a while, it occurred to me that I should move somewhere more secure before collapsing to a vegetative state. While sitting up in a daze, this guy walks by, we say hello and he introduces himself to me as the only black man in town. Can’t remember his first name but his last name was Berry – as he later claimed relation to Chuck Berry. We talked for a while, him tickled about the state I was in and me mostly listening. The topic of racism came up. Mr. Berry said his family’d been in this area for a long time, intermarrying with Cherokee, until a spate of lynchings’d scared off all but his immediate family. When asked if there was still much racism around there, he said there was but that most of the racists were like dogs, that is, their bark was worse than their bite and they were all too cowardly to mess with him. I could sort of identify, having just chased off loud-barking [...] Continue Reading…

200 miles/~14 hours in the saddle/~14 mph average

Woke up ready for a low-key day. We all had breakfast at The Copper Kettle, which I remember being particularly good and fatty. The morning was cool and we all rode together towards Toronto at a relaxed pace. Speed eventually separated us and it was with Nick and Clay that I first stopped for the day at around mile 20 at a small gas station at the intersection of 54 and 105, just north of Toronto.

The gas station was run by a friendly lady who had us sign a guestbook. Somehow we got on the topic of language, and she taught us a few phrases of Cherokee…all of which I have forgotten (I think goodbye was something like ‘until our horses face each other again’). Her arms were tattooed with images of her spirit animals, a raven and a snake of some kind. She gave us each a tiny, plastic lizard as a memento. This may have been a good luck charm.

Outside the station we turned south and were excited to find the wind was blowing our way. It felt like we hadn’t had a tailwind in ages. The riding felt effortless [...] Continue Reading…

After much tall talk the night before about riding 200 miles, the hugeness of the endeavor began to sink in. Clay, who did manage it, hadn’t intentionally set out to do so until the possibility occurred to him later in the day. This morning we were premeditating it…and sometimes the best laid plans of bikes and men go awry.

Leaving Newton we found that we were facing a headwind. This was discouraging but not disastrous, as winds can and do change. The next obstacle we discovered was less mild and more permanent. Beautiful, flat Kansas was slowly, slowly turning less and less flat. First we spotted a few gentle up and down slopes. Then came a few rises that actually blocked your vision of the horizon for a moment. Finally, 10 or so miles into the ride, there were actual hills.

Hills were back and the holiday was over.

For these reasons, and mostly because he’d done it before and was beginning his shift in riding style from ordeal to bonding opportunity, Clay gave up on the dub cench about 15 miles in. We’d been commenting on the unlikelihood of accomplishing it already but I’d met each naysaying with a grim, determined [...] Continue Reading…

This day was spent driving up to Kansas City with Mom, jumping through baroque bureaucratic hoops at the Austrian Honorary Consulate, only to find that the application then needed to be sent on to Chicago before being sent on to Vienna. I’ll spare the boring bureaucratic rigamarole but let’s just say that there was a reason that Kafka was Austrian. After an afternoon of this, I got in touch with Stephen and the rest o’ the gang, figured out where they’d be camping for the night.

Because of this ride, I do not qualify for a certificate from Adventure Cycling stating that I completed the TransAm. They can keep their piece of paper. I’ll keep the experience.

Had KFC buffet for dinner, where a lonely old man rambled anti-Obama conspiracy theories over his plate of chicken bones.

Caught up with Clay, Gabe and Nick in Newton, Kansas – a Mennonite town whose female population all seemed to be out that night, wandering around in old-fashioned, extremely unrevealing multi-colored dresses of the Amish persuasion. We met up at the city park and set up camp, as per usual, in a pavilion there. As night fell, Clay told me the story of his dub [...] Continue Reading…

The familiar routine of waking up in an unfamiliar scene. This time a WPA-era pavilion with a ceiling of wooden girders on which Gabe’s hammock hung like a humungous chrysalis. Without Clay to wake the group up with gangsta rap at 5 or 6, it was left to me to provide wake up music. We decided to have some sit-down breakfast, so we loaded up and wandered the streets looking for a greasy spoon diner.

Strangely, many downtown streets in Kansas are paved with bricks and are not particularly comfortable for riding. The only explanation I got of these brick streets was that bricks were chosen in order to increase the amount of work for New Deal-funded laborers ala Keynes – but this could be hearsay. Finding no diner, we ate at Wendy’s and were pleasantly surprised. Many people in the restaurant stopped and talked with us about what we were doing and wished us luck. Larned is home to a mental institution, so the joke was that we should be put in there for doing such a bike ride. You got the sense that the locals used variations of this joke often.

We biked south out of town, crossing the [...] Continue Reading…

Day 41: Dighton to Larned

100 miles

Awoke to a lack of sleep and an excess of barbecue in my system. Clay was already ready already early in the morning and was on his way to the next town before the sleep was out of the rest of our eyes.

Little did we know that Clay would end up going for, and accomplishing, a ‘double century’ or a ‘dub cench,’ as the kids call it these days…by kids, I mean us. A ‘century’ is a 100 mile ride, so a dub cench is riding 200 miles in one day. This is no minor feat, I assure you. You can read about Clay’s adventure at this post on his blog:

http://ffnation.blogspot.com/2009/07/double-century-and-beyond.html

Nick was soon on his way, as well, with a belly full of ramen. Stephen, The Gabe and I, the lollygaggers, decided teamwork and strategery were what we needed to get us down the road, so we set up a three-person pelleton, with each person taking a turn up in front of the pack for a five mile stint. Tired and stuffed, we bade farewell to Dighton, Kansas, the site of such unexpected adventure and relaxation.

Rest days like that [...] Continue Reading…

Uncertainty loomed as our gang of 7 went to breakfast at The Bowling Alley (the venue reputed to serve Dighton’s best breakfast). The uncertainty was whether Stephen and I would take a rest day in Dighton or not. The only fear for us was that we might not make our targeted finish date if we took any more rest days. Calculations of mileage were made. Scenarios were imagined.

In the meantime, we had a huge, greasy breakfast. Entered SnakeMode (a state of satiation in which you can and wish to do little more than crawl onto a sunlit rock and nap). Stephen and I decide to stay for the Backyard Bash, trusting the hopeful mathematical projections for the rest of the trip would still get us to the coast on time. The girls decide to go on, keeping to their steady pace, untempted by barbecue and Real America. As in life, everyone’s on their own little path at their own little pace, and while it’s wonderful that paths cross with wonderful people for brief glimpses and glances of time, [...] Continue Reading…

Day 63/62 miles

Up at 7am in Troutville. A quick glance out the window showed only a few wisps of fog in the valley, so an early start was possible. Over continental breakfast – another huge luxury we’ve been enjoying since The Father Figure joined us. Rain was forecast but everything looked clear so we got on the road as quickly as possible.

We were back on our old friend, the Lee Highway aka US-11. Our pace was strong, with me pulling the group for a ten-mile stretch into Buchanan, a town 15 miles down the road. We replenished our drinks and continued on, this time taking the country back roads suggested by our TransAm map…at this point, we take the original TransAm route as a suggestion and not law. It’s our trip and we’ll go across how we please.

There was a nice, relatively cool stretch on these backroads, with enough ups and downs to keep it interesting. The road flirted and skirted around our familiar nemesis and constant companion, US-81, a major interstate we’ve been stalking for the past couple of days. It’s a nice, strange feeling to be on these pastoral backroads and then to find the path straying [...] Continue Reading…

Day 38: Tribune to Dighton, Kansas

As I recall, we all woke up in the large metal barn structure in good condition, having survived the lightning storm the night before. We all cooked breakfast on the dirt floor, a few of us even being so kind as to eliminate the weight of the left-over beers from the night before, keeping someone from having to carry them further.

Rebecca and Mia, as would become usual, were the first to be ready and on the trail for the day. Clay, Gabe and Nick always seemed to be ready before Stephen and I. My attitude is that I’m ready when I’m ready – why rush an 80 mile day? Anyway, Nick headed out early, as well, looking to keep to his normal strategy of gruntwork pedaling.

Clay and I, if I remember correctly, decided to see how fast we could conquer this distance. After stretching, we set up our plan of attack: a 2-man pelleton. The puller would keep at a 20mph pace for 5 miles while the drafter staid back and conserved energy, trading off every 5 miles. We stopped only once at around 20 miles for a few breakfast burritos. Apparently we [...] Continue Reading…