Tag Archives: bicycle travel

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Today has been an interesting day. By interesting I mean completely and utterly SHITTY. Yesterday was quite nice though. I covered approximately fifty miles over about four and a half hours of cycling. That includes stopping for photographs and having lunch at a Subway, so I made pretty great time. That night I camped in Osceola National Forest near to Ocean Pond, a body of water which is as it sounds—a very, very large pond (basically a lake)—and one which I wanted to visit this morning but didn’t due to waking up to precipitation in the form of water falling from the sky. In truth I didn’t really wake up to much rain but I befriended a fellow, Connor, who was traveling by motorcycle (I thought him much smarter than I), and we struck up conversation which of course slowed my packing considerably. Enough so that by the time I DID manage to cram my belongings into the various bags that they only kind of sort of fit in, including the backpack that was not brought along with this intention, the rain, or the day’s SHITTINESS did truly begin.

It was with a sigh of exasperation and arms in the air with resignation and of course-ness that I wandered off along a hard-packed sandy road to Route 90, which, despite it being designated a “route” or highway, is actually relatively quiet and came complete with a cycling lane.

For twenty or so miles I pedaled. The rain let up some, then came down harder, then let up again, then, as though a zipper was undone along the bottom of some bulging cloud above me, rain came down by the bucketsful (as they say). My back ached from the backpack, my thighs chafed from my soaked bibs, and as I slowed down upon arriving at Lake City (checking for coffee and food resources of any kind from my phone) I began to shiver. Not the best set of circumstances to find oneself in.

As there were no small, specialty or family-owned types of cafes in town, I made my way to a Panera on the far western edge of town, chosen for its wi-fi and the heartier food options than the nearby Starbucks. Well? What else is one to do in this situation?

Anyway. I dined on warm carbohydrates, and was bought a coffee by a woman who cycles, runs and generally speaking stays active. We chatted for a bit and it was apparent that she was genuinely enthused about my trip. It was here, after stripping out of my sopping jacket and jersey for a dry top and my insulated jacket, that I decided to seek refuge for the night at the Driftwood Motel, an appropriately named place for the state I was in. So here I am, in Tallahassee, typing this up as though I was still in that motel with the time to write while my tent and other belongings were strewn about the motel room undampening in a pretended state of organization while I prepared my meh dinner of rice, red lentils, zucchini, garlic, and a few snagged basil leaves from a cart of plants lined up against a fence at Walmart.

Hopefully my things dry out completely overnight, though I’m not counting on that, and any rain tomorrow is spottier and weaker. Twenty miles is a pathetic distance for a day, and I’m rather done with this getting soaked business. I should probably just walk back to the Walmart and buy a poncho (assuming they have any)….

New Mexico

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Tucumcari
Tucumcari. The previous two images are also of this motel.
This and the previous five photographs were taken in Santa Rosa.
Lit by the sun in the distance. What is that? Somewhere between Santa Rosa and Las Vegas.
My host’s van in Las Vegas. They were a fabulous couple, and I received some fantastic advice on my circuitous route to Santa Fe
Somewhere on 434 between Mora and Angel Fire.
This was a tough climb, though mercifullly short, from Angel Fire to Taos. The downhill portion was marvelous and went on just about the whole way into Taos.
I passed this view pretty much everyday in Taos. It was one of my favorites.
My host’s neighbor had this sitting in their yard near the road.
Part of my host’s yard.
Ravens
Taos Museum shop.
Taos mesa, where some off-grid living is happening.
Rio Grande in its gorge sweeping rafters along.
Silk flower.
Rio Grand Gorge. This was on my way to Santa Fe before my knee became really unhappy with me.
The End. About ten miles from Santa Fe.
Santa Fe graffiti.

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Things have gotten simultaneously simpler and trickier since hurting my knee. I’m going back to Taos this evening for the weekend. Staying with Jeanne. Haven’t yet determined whether I’ll rent a car in Taos or Santa Fe—I can take a bus from one to the other if necessary. The only reason, at this point, for renting in Santa Fe is that I may need to order some things and have them shipped there. I can really only be in Taos until Tuesday, AND I want to get on the road. Hopefully this car rental thing goes smoothly.

The reason I’m ordering things is because I’m selling things. Shrinking and lightening up my kit. Hopefully it all goes, especially the trailer which I’ve been tired of for seemingly ages. The lighter my kit may be the sooner I can be back on my bike again.

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I’ve been lucky to have stayed with great people during my journey. I suppose to say “I’ve been lucky” is false, for most everyone who belongs to the WarmShowers network is an understanding, sympathetic, and generous host, often going beyond what any rational person’s expectations of kindness and hospitality might be. One might think that after experiencing such fantastic hospitality at host’s place after host’s place that I would have adjusted my expectations accordingly, but I never do; it always yields such sweet surprises to expect so little and receive so much. I would imagine too it would be more difficult to play the gracious, thankful guest if I just assumed so much to be normal behavior.

I’m currently writing this at Ten Thousand Waves, and I am sitting here outside, in a lounge chair by the communal bath: a hot water pool with a cold one next to it separated by a low wall which one might hop or slide over from one to the other. After sitting in the hot water bath for ten minutes, maybe longer, getting nice and cooked (and very relaxed), taking a dip in the cold water bath is marvelously refreshing. It’s a frightful shock as well, and wonderfully stimulating, especially if one sits for about an equal amount of time as one had sat in the hot water pool. Most people don’t do this however, and spend little more than fifteen or twenty seconds partly submerged in the chill of the cold water. These persons’ experience of the baths is resultantly hollow and lacking by comparison. Unfortunate for them, I guess. But this strikes me as so typical of the 20th/21st century (and other centuries too, but I wasn’t quite alive then so can’t comment, or I could, but then this would turn into some sort of long essay about the aristocracy of centuries past, and how as we’ve moved into the twentieth that aristocracy developed into the rich, upper class which the ever growing middle class wished (and wishes still!) to emulate, and then there’s the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” thing, and yadda yadda yadda), developed nation attitude. So many of these people want all the comfort, warmth, and luxury available to them, but don’t want the slightest bit of discomfort to get in the way of that. They want to be coddled, and wrapped in silk undies and lingerie, and sleep on their thousand thread-count sheets with their 900-fill down duvet. Life to them, I should think, is accordingly felt less acutely. It is a thin attenuation, and no matter the width of their televisions, the suppleness of their automobile’s suspension, or the loft of their pillows they lie their heads on, nothing can broaden that stripe. The easier one’s life becomes the more one expects it to be so, and the harder it is to willingly insert hardship or difficulty into it.

Anyway, the spa is located up in the mountains, a few hundred feet higher in elevation than Santa Fe proper. Lounging in the pool one’s view is an assemblage of Piñon Pines, Cottonwoods, Maples and Oaks which grow just beyond the boundaries of the property. Up above, nothing but a big, mottled, blue and white sky, the white bits mutating, always in flux, changing shape, drifting by lazily like manta rays in the sea, or aspen pollen in the mountains. The experience is one of complete luxury. I’ve never experienced it before and I suspect it will be some time before I do so again.

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05/20

Tomorrow will be two months on the road. That’s something.

No, it isn’t anything.

It’s something.
But it’s not everything.
Glory, glory, glory! Fucking New Mexico! Glory, glory, glory!

The light. The clarity. Brilliant. Unimaginable. Unfathomable, until one arrives. The whole world in crystalline sharpness. Like being dropped into a single pearl of dew that may or may not be clinging to a blade of grass or a spider’s web—it could be freely drifting through the air for all I can imagine—and peering out through your suddenly liquid, spherical window-wall and everything exterior of it glimmering and percolating brilliantly, like all the constituent parts of the world have been stored inside a champagne bottle and then shaken up, and the cork popped and existence exploded everywhere eventually forming the state of New Mexico, or at least this particular part of it. Spaces long and wide and vast, undulating, slanting. Low-growing sagey plants, prickly, and loofah-like; pine trees stuck in the ground like toothpicks. Dandelions are so much smaller than these, like me, but tower over the ants that crawl among their green stems and fronds and yellow caps, like I crawl across this landscape, over these mountains and plateaus, through the forests of tall trees, and down through valleys narrow and wide, alone.

What is it like to be an ant, I wonder. To be nothing on its own, but only defined by the colony which it is a part. I wonder what it is like to be a colony of ants, defined by its individual members all together, working harmoniously as one single organism in the same way as a human body is a single organism made of its individual blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells, nerves, hormones, gut bacteria and on and on….
Sometimes one stumbles across the right person at the right time.
But back to New Mexico whose mountains run along in unbroken chains like clasped hands. And there are creeks and rivers too, that race towards whatever it is they race towards, the sound of their waters splashing among the rocks like laughter, like the arc of a cliff swallow, like kids playing marbles on a city sidewalk in front of some row homes in, say, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. They wind down slope and across field, a ribbon of shimmering sunlight wrapped around a gift that one can not seem to break into, whose wrapping paper can not be torn, nor seams untaped. The signs, as invisible as they may be, read plainly, “LOOK BUT DO NOT TOUCH.”

Texas

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An example of wind. Mind you it wasn’t gusting so hard that it bent was bending this adult tree, but just that it blows hard enough and regularly enough in this region to shape trees in such a manner.
This was pretty awful. The experience of being here, however, was not. The Coney Island Cafe, Pampa, TX.
Amarillo. The “S.E. Asian district.”
Amarillo.
Amarillo.
Amarillo.
Amarillo.
Amarillo.
Time moves on. Adrian, TX.
Near the NM border.

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A final coffee at Jacob’s. Something from Evocation. Melancholy a bit, as usual. Bon Iver’s self-titled on the record player.

Quiet.

Little conversation.

He hasn’t had his coffee yet.
Looking outside. The sky is a dull grey-white, like the ash left dangling from the end of a cigarette. Everything not of an ethereal nature is dripping. That includes my bike that was locked up beneath the overhang of his patio. It might be fifty degrees out there. The weather fits my mood, though I prefer it rather not. But what difference does that make, really?

The coffee is delicious. It’s finally cooled, and I can taste it in depth now: apricot, subtly floral, soft but lively acidity. I love African coffees. Preferably Kenyans, but wet-process Ethiopians have a nuanced, delicate majesty all their own.

Amarillo, like most (all?) Texas cities, is sprawling, and designed for vehicular traffic. Thank God for the bike path, though…

I’ve been interrupted by Jacob. Perhaps I’ll finish my thought later.

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“I’m bursting, Jerry! I’m bursting!” Mr. Costanza would say.

Crept into Amarillo not long ago. By “crept into” I mean I’m in the seedy-looking outskirts—not yet downtown—which actually don’t seem to be seedy at all, but instead, the buildings backing up into quiet neighborhoods beyond, there is a peaceful happiness, and a sense of contentment, that all is well. They, or at least this area, could very easily be defined as the S.E. Asia district. I’ve never seen so many Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese restaurants and grocers in one place. My curiosity and fascination are peaked (and my hunger has been so).

I’m at a Pho restaurant in which men are gambling away at machines in one corner while a family, or two? (I can’t tell), or, perhaps, various friends sit in a group and converse amongst themselves. Toddlers are roaming around, climbing over chairs, over people, dancing on the pool tables. There is a man at one of the tables occupied by the group smoking a cigarette. A television is on in a corner, tuned to CNN. An old woman sidles over to me to inquire as to how my meal is, and offers me an ice tea. I surmise that she cooked my meal. Also, this seems, based on other cycle travelers’ blogs, standard treatment in S.E. Asia for guests, and, especially those traveling in lesser style and comfort, depending on how you define that, such as yours truly.

The restaurant (/gambling and games hall) is a huge space, plainly and sparsely decorated in the fashion of so many excellent Asian restaurants. Large, clay tiles make up the floor. Spartan, white walls. Cheap masonite tables and office chairs. Poorly taken photographs of food, stuck to the walls. Poster-size, laminated beer list (extremely short) with prices—Miller Lite $2.50, Heineken $3.00, Dos Equis $3.00, Smirnoff $3.00—tacked to a wall. Table cloths on some tables, or not. Four pool tables, one of which with the aforementioned children playing atop it. A little girl two chairs next to me playing with a phone. A general air of merriment, happiness, family, joy, love, fun. The meal was fantastic, and even more so for the generous discount I was given.

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Further observations of Oklahoma:
The landscape, geography, topography smoothing out, like two ends of a coil pulled farther and farther apart. Slowly. Mile after mile. The hills longer. Gentler. Not so sharp and jagged, but worn like an old, old saw blade.

Hay baled in bales, each rolled up like a single piece of taffy and placed musically throughout their fields, like the pits in the plates of an antique music box, ticking little teeth to play a silent score. The score of the tractor and the farmer, the flycatcher and kingbird, of the changing seasons, and, once, of the sweat and toil that is still practiced in small pockets, remote areas of the world where the people still rely on milk from their cows to survive the winter, and the hay that they grow sustains them in their mountain villages. It is a music that often isn’t heard, and one need no musical instruments to play it, nor a knowledge of theory or scales to understand it. It is the rhythm of a life lived simply, and it is felt in the blood and in the skin.

The ancient windmill erect and lonely in a field of wheat, it’s blades twisted and broken, no longer spinning freely, exuberantly in the rushing wind, but dangling from its axis like the shadow of a Calder mobile—sad, and delicate, and beautiful—or like Nanantatee’s “poor broken crutch of an arm” in H. Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

The butterflies, just the size of a quarter, in chalky shades of yellow, blue and brown,
that dance across the highway, some singly, others in pairs—a duet in four dimensions, turning round and round and round each other, swooping up and down in elegant dress, like some Japanese in his-and-hers best kimonos celebrating the new day like it is a new year.

The little beetles with their glinting, hard carapaces that shine like plate armor, skittering across the road, legs moving like a pianists’s fingers playing a prestissimo.

The traffic on the interstate, which parallels route 66, and seems to sail by in the distance like ships on an horizon.

Clouds at the end of the day which look as if they were applied to the sky with a palette knife—a steely, grey-blue smeared onto an aged, slightly yellowed canvas.

Fields of wheat, golden-blonde and pea-green shimmering under the afternoon sun, every stalk leaning in unison with the wind, beautiful like a head of hair, like the Greek gods, like cracked and ancient pottery, like archaeological sites going on and on seemingly forever like the Euphrates and Tigris rivers through Mesopotamia when giants still strode the land.

A sign advertising astronaut Thomas P. Stafford as from Weatherford, OK,
And another sign advertising Garth Brooks as from Yukon.