Category: Mississippi

July 7th, 2006

We are writing this tonight from a National Park Service campground at Mile Post 193 on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. We rode 66 miles today, and it was just gorgeous the entire way. The horrendous humidity and rain that has been plaguing us the last week or so finally lifted with a strong breeze last night, actually more like a wind. It finally dried off our tent, and took away the humidity and the clouds, leaving the air much cooler as well. What a relief!

The only bad news was that the wind became headwinds for us the entire day, which slowed our progress a lot. We felt up to having our first 80-100 mile day, and feel convinced that we could have if we hadn’t had the headwinds. The wind has died down tonight, so we are aiming to do significant mileage tomorrow.

(more…)

July 6th, 2006

Sorry for our long silence, but the rigors of our trip have been catching up to us the last two weeks. I remain astonished at how much time it takes just to keep on top of our daily tasks. We get up between 5:30 and 6 a.m., and it usually takes us about 45 minutes to an hour to get ready to go, by the time we get down to the washroom, get dressed, slather on sunscreen, and eat something. Most mornings we are pretty tired, so we are moving fairly slowly. We have to pack up our belongings from the tent from the night before and make sure everything is in the car so that Stacey and Alex can pack more easily.

(more…)

June 23rd, 2006

Each day continues to be a big adventure. Today we left Bayou La Batre, AL, at 6:45 a.m. and headed out right into headwinds for the first 36 miles. It’s certainly a strength building opportunity! The heat was a major factor today, too – for most of the last two hours or more it felt like riding right into a blast furnace. The terrain was fine – but we had pretty busy traffic all the way past Wade MS.

We were then routed into a back road that goes through the Pascagoula River Wildlife Management Area. It was too hot and too late in the day (though it was only 11 a.m.) to see much in the way of wildlife, but we really enjoyed the route and the lower traffic. We had one wild experience in that section – we could see a road department mower up ahead of us – the kind that just chews up and spits out anything in its path. The cloud of dust it was blowing up was really amazing, and it was billowing out right into the road. We knew we had to pass, so we speeded up a bit and swung wide to go ahead. Even though we have wide-coverage sunglasses, we still had to squint our eyes nearly shut, and had to close our mouths almost flat shut because of the bits of debris – it was like going through a debris hailstorm.

(more…)