Category: 2006 Cycling Across America

  • Mile Post 193 on the Natchez Trace Parkway

    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.

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  • Jackson MS; 1046 miles and still rolling…

    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.

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  • Vancleave MS; 49 miles – 663 miles and still rolling…

    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.

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  • Bayou La Batre AL

    June 22nd, 2006

    We have spent the entire day catching up on our blogs and getting the picture gallery sorted out. We still have a ways to go on that, as we have several hundred+ pictures to sort through, from two different cameras. We need to choose the best ones, give them captions, and organize them by date. It’s a big job! We then need to upload all our photos to the Google Picasa web gallery (we got accepted into their beta test which just started a few days ago). Evelyn can grab them from there and put them on our website. Bear with us while we catch up to ourselves on this one. I have referred in several places to the gallery of photos, but we haven’t gotten there quite yet. Give us a day or so, still.

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  • Bayou La Batre, AL; Mobile AL, and Biloxi MS

    June 21, 2006

    It was a great joy to sleep in today, although after riding for 6 straight days and then having a whirlwind day yesterday, I still feel like I could sleep for hours. I spent a quick hour working in the motel lobby on my presentation, and then we took off for Mobile Alabama, where I spoke for an hour to the Mobile RIG. What a great treat it was! It was a small group, but a great location and a nice room. The investors appeared to be pretty sophisticated, with some very experienced folks in the group. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk, and only wished I could have had more time to talk informally with them. It was an hour lunch, and most of them had to leave immediately after I spoke.

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  • Bayou La Batre AL, 19 miles, and Pensacola FL

    June 20, 2006

    We had such a fun easy ride today, with only one challenge – the bridge right outside the island. It’s a four-mile bridge, and reaches impressive heights, at least to a bicyclist who’s not at all fond of heights. I had to talk myself up this one –you can check out a distance view of it in our picture gallery. I just kept my eyes on the road, and put one foot after the other, and sure enough, Chelsea was soon calling me to stop and take pictures at the top. Alex was quite funny, driving next to me for a short ways, calling out encouragement. 🙂 There’s more evidence of hurricane damage here – it’s clear to see that there used to be roadside businesses here, but all that remains in some cases are just twisted timbers or foundations. You can see a great photo of a waterfront fixer-upper in our gallery.

    Bayou is an extremely small town, despite the fact that it seems to go on for a ways. The kids went out for food last night, and everything was completely closed down by 8:30 at night. The only excitement in town was the local Sonic drive-in, so that’s what we had for dinner at 9:30 pm. When Chelsea and I finished our miles today, we asked a local woman if there was any place to get breakfast, and she looked at us in near total disbelief, and said, “In Bayou?!” We couldn’t help but laugh…and she was right…we had our breakfast at Sonic!

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  • Bayou La Batre AL (actually to Dauphin Island; 30 miles plus a few miles on the ferry)

    June 19th, 2006

    Chelsea and I got a great early start today, and still had tail winds. What a treat! The terrain was as flat as could be and we sailed west right along the Perdido Key, headed up towards Gulf Shores, and then west again on Ft Morgan Parkway. We had beautiful views of ocean for the first part, and shaded roads for much of the way along the Parkway. The area along the Parkway just after Gulf Shores reminds us a lot of the sections of Florida we went through, but it suddenly changed again as we got closer to Fort Morgan. The style of houses changed to the stilt structures we had seen in Orange Beach, and we suddenly realized how close we were to water on both sides. Check out our photo gallery for the houses we saw.

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  • Orange Beach AL; 53 miles

    June 18th, 2006

    We reached a milestone! We are in Alabama! Florida is such a big state, that we had begun to feel like we would never get out of the state. But here we are in Orange Beach AL. The day was much tougher than we expected, especially after our “high” of yesterday. The traffic out of Milton was amazingly heavy, but we had been warned that one of the hurricanes took out a bridge on I-10, and that the traffic was being routed onto Hwy 90. That didn’t seem to account for all of it, however, as traffic was really heavy all day.

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  • Milton FL; 71 miles

    June 17th, 2006

    We rode 71 miles today! It’s hard to believe, but we ended up having one of our best days right after one of our hardest.

    Wow, was it hard to get out of bed this morning! After a few days running of heat and hills and wind, we were heading out armed with only determination to keep us going. The “bicycle gods” must have heard us, because we had 45 miles of smooth flat sailing with great tailwinds. Yes, we certainly do like tailwinds! The time just flew by, and we had some energy to stop and take some great pictures of housing along the way (check out the photo gallery). In Holt we stopped to assess our situation, and after talking over the upcoming section with several locals, we decided to push on, knowing that we would break our daily mileage record by a lot.

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  • DeFuniak Springs FL; 52.5 miles

    June 16th, 2006

    Today was a much tougher day. We started out from the Winn Dixie early, but the heat started in right away. We’ve noticed that the heat/humidity combination is really a killer. We reached Chipley early, and took a great break at the Chamber of Commerce there – we’ve gotten to where we always look for a place with a bench or a good curb – riding and standing only for 6 hours a day gets tiring quickly. It was fun to sit quietly on a bench under an overhang and watch the activity. That being said, there wasn’t a whole lot of activity at 8:30 in the morning. 🙂 It was hard to tear ourselves away from such a comfortable spot, but it was still early, so we hopped back on the bikes. One nice thing about this section of the trip is that there are small towns every 6-11 miles, so it’s much easier to keep ourselves going “just till the next town”.

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