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.
The campgrounds are unpredictable in terms of where we end the day’s riding and where they are located, so we almost always have anywhere from 15-45 minutes to get forward or backward to our starting place. We then have to get the bikes down from the roof rack, get our handlebar bags on, our helmets and gloves on, and get into our Camelback backpacks. That’s another 15 minutes at least.
This means that we may get started anywhere from 6:30 on a really good day, to a usual time of 7:30 or so. Our latest day was after 8 a.m., as we had over an hour’s drive to our starting place, through tortuously winding (but gorgeous!) back roads.
Depending on heat, humidity, hills, and headwinds, we ride anywhere from 5-7 hours. Alex then meets us, but that has been pretty unpredictable, as it often doesn’t make sense to have them take our exact route, so we may have a delay of anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and a half before they get us.
We then need to find a campground, and while we usually have a pretty good idea of where we want to go, it often takes awhile to find the place. We then need to register and get set up in the spot. By this time, it’s anywhere from 2:30 to 4 p.m.
We have to set up the tent, get out the food and dish boxes, along with our sleeping bags, and so on. Chelsea and I need to get showers as soon as possible, so we grab our washing up supplies and a clean change of clothes and head off to the showers. We both have to shower (there is often only one shower so we have to wait for each other), and if the campground doesn’t have a laundry facility, then we have to hand wash our cycling clothes and carry them back. If we are lucky, we then have to get quarters and head over to the laundry facility. That takes another hour or so, as we have to wait for the washers to finish, and we often have to wait for the washers to even be available. We infinitely prefer to use the washers, as the spin cycle is far more effective than us wringing out the clothes by hand, and gives us a greater likelihood that they will dry by morning. Although…
The humidity is a serious factor here in Mississippi – we have been ranging from 85-100% humidity, and temperatures have been in the mid to high 90’s. At night it will be 89 degrees in the tent as we are going to sleep, and the rain will start in, dripping, dripping, dripping. We spent 3 days in a gorgeous but partially primitive campsite over July 4 (got rained out of our ride on the fourth), and we were wet the entire time. We couldn’t wait until yesterday when we got to a campsite above Jackson MS that had a great laundry facility. We washed nearly everything we owned – towels, sheets, cycling clothes, t-shirts – just to have them dry again! As you may imagine, nothing, but nothing, dries in these conditions.
After showers and laundry and setting up camp, we still have to eat. That means more time to get the dishes out, cook the food – we have a two burner camp stove, so that makes things go more quickly, but we then have to walk the dishes down somewhere to get them washed up. We usually have to do this for both “lunch” and dinner.
We also have 3 MP3 players, 4 cell phones, and a laptop that need to be charged, so if we are lucky enough to have a campsite that has onsite electricity, we are jockeying for position on the outlets.
By this time, it’s usually about 4-6 p.m., and we will still have dinner to prepare and clean up, and we have to do whatever errands need to be done, never mind the fact that Chelsea and I still need to get everything ready for the following day. We need to get our mileage off our cyclometers, we need to fill our backpacks with water, we have to make sure that we have sunscreen, clean riding clothes, our helmets and handlebar bags and gloves and shoes are all together and ready to go, and we have to make very sure that we have our food prepared and in our bags.
We have to shop for food and water and ice – we try to do that every other day, but we at least have to find ice daily, and we need to get gas on a regular basis. We need to charge the phones, and if we can, we need to find someplace that has Verizon signal so we can do at least the most basic communicating.
Meanwhile, we have everything else to do! We have blogs to write, we have to update our trip mileage, we have to reconcile our trip expenses, we have to reconcile bank accounts, we have to deal with any real estate activity, we have to download our pictures from each of two cameras to the laptop, we have to organize them and give them captions and upload them to our Picasa web gallery (this part is a really time consuming process and we are slowly working on it), we have write up our notes on our thoughts and observations on the daily “viewing” of the local real estate, deal with any Compass Rose business, and check our email – which means both reading and responding.
Since it gets dark by 8 p.m., and we are working by flashlight or lantern after that, we have only about 2 hours a day for errands and all of our other tasks.
So are you tired yet, just reading this? 🙂 We are!!
We have been really surprised at how little signal we have had. One day, we couldn’t even get enough signal to even send a text message to Alex to come and pick us up! Alex and Stacey finally started getting concerned when it was 12:30 and they hadn’t heard anything from us, so they headed out, and then we got enough signal when we reached our ending spot that we could make a quick call on roaming. It still took them well over an hour to reach us, so we sat on a bench outside the city hall (which is only open Tues-Fri from 9-noon), in 95+ degree heat, for that whole time, dreaming of a long cold shower.
We are nearly always on roaming, if we can get any signal at all. We have been watching our maps carefully, and we get excited when we are going to be near a “big town”, but we have realized that that in itself takes on a whole new meaning. We deliberately ended one day in Bogalusa, LA, as we thought that with a population of 13,000+ that we would certainly have a signal. Nope. After riding around the area for over an hour, Chelsea and I ended up at the public library getting out just the most urgent communications.
I’m going to end now, as the sun is setting, and we still have to prepare and clean up dinner, and get ready for tomorrow. We had a “rest day” today, as Alex had to get up in the wee hours to drive up to Memphis (3 hours away) to get Stacey off to the airport – her tour of duty has ended after a month on the road with us. Our “rest day” consisted of going like mad to catch up on our backlog. 🙂
We’ll be out of touch the next 3 days at least, as we are on the Natchez Trace Parkway just above Jackson MS, and we are aiming to hit Tupelo by Sunday. We are going to be near no cities that are big enough to have any signal. We have been working on ways to streamline our systems, and we hope to implement some new systems over the next few weeks.
We are also starting to hit the really serious hills – they are getting noticeably steeper already, and from what we know, the Ozarks in Tennessee, which we will hit on Monday, are nearly the toughest of the trip. That means we will be a lot more tired than usual, until we build strength. We are pretty pleased so far, as we can actually see our legs changing shape. We still are challenging ourselves more and more every day, so we haven’t yet caught up to our potential. 🙂
We are trying to get things set up so we can write at least every day (but that still feels like a lofty expectation), and we have lots of fun stories to tell you about the last few weeks. Until then, wish us happy riding and great campgrounds! And thanks so incredibly much to those of you who have sent us personal notes of congratulations and good wishes! It means more than we can say to know that you are thinking of us and that you actually take the time to write us. I can say without hesitation that even though I have done some outrageous things in my time, this is right up there in contention for the top of the list, so your well-wishing is much appreciated and valued!