Next steps

Just got back from my first effort to assess my health. So far, seems solid! I took a 15 mile ride out to the suburbs with my dad, mostly unloaded (although at the last minute I put my five-pound penny jar in the handlebar bag because unloaded was too weird). I’m pretty sure I have more energy after riding than I did before, perhaps due to the fact that sleeping all day is not the recommended road to a high-energy lifestyle, and my tonsils remain quiescent.

Now with that good ride under my belt, I will get down to the rather more icky business of buying a ticket to Cincinnati, which will likely involve flying out from Providence or Manchester, since the privilege of flying out of Logan doubles the cost of the ticket, which is maybe not acceptable given that I’ll already be spending more shipping my bicycle as shipping my body. O the injustice!

Flight search update: while looking for the most reasonable deals on carrying my bike, I spent some time puzzling over US Airways’ policy on “special items.” My favorites:

Mormonism, Vegetable Mysteries, and More!

Hello from North Tonawanda, a town just outside of Buffalo, NY, and several miles away from Niagara Falls! Today was my first day of riding solo, and I am happy to report that it was totally great! Some more unorganized thoughts are below:

1. High school pride: in a bunch of towns that we have passed, the “Welcome to _____ ” sign at the beginning of town has also featured information on sports team accomplishments for the local high school, sometimes dating from over a decade ago. It made me think about how connected I would feel to my high school if I ended up living back at home and had my kids going to the same school I went to – and if high school was the last school I attended (or if the college I went to didn’t feel so culturally immersive).

2. Mormonism: yesterday, we passed through some major Mormon history! First, we went through the tiny town of Port Byron, where Brigham Young lived. Then, we went through Palmyra, a town near where, according to Mormon belief, Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates that revealed the teachings of LDS to him.

3. Sprawl or History: a couple of nights ago, we stayed with the family of a friend of the girls I have been biking with in Camillus, NY, a small town just west of Syracuse (essentially a suburb of the city). The town itself is just about as old, if not older, than Syracuse itself, and it got me thinking: at what point does a town stop being a historical settlement and become suburban sprawl?

4. The Cross-Country Voyage: The first night we camped out, in West Brookfield, MA, we heard from the campground owner about a 9000-mile, cross-country road trip he had made 15 years earlier. A couple of days later, we ran into a woman in Windsor, MA (the tiny Berkshire Mountains town) who had done a bike trip from the East Coast to Michigan. Yesterday, one of the people we stayed with talked about how he did a cross-country motorcycle trip many, many years ago to visit all of his contacts from when he was in the army (he said he would write them letters in advance, and then show up with either a bottle of whiskey or a roast beef as a housewarming gift). It’s amazing how many people you run into with this same kind of story, and it underscores how the idea of cross-country travel is set somewhere in the American imagination. There is a desire to feel like you can encompass the whole of the country in one fell swoop if you cross it – or you can at least get close.

That’s all for now, except for two short anecdotes from what I thought about alone on a bicycle today – in case I haven’t seemed crazy enough already! For the five miles outside of Albion, NY, I got completely fascinated watching strewn pieces of lettuce on the shoulder that I was riding on. Somehow, a couple of heads of lettuce must have gotten loose and bits and pieces were there for literally miles! Every time I thought they were finally finished, more would appear! Even though I thought about it A LOT, I still can’t figure out exactly how the pieces would have gotten torn and separated like that.

I also puzzled over this sign from the First Baptist Church in Medina, NY: “Choosing life in a pagan culture.” I guess sensical sayings are difficult with limited space.

FYI: the mono timeline

Monday 5/18: Day 1 of biking. Slight sore throat, slight pain difficulty eating sandwich at lunch. Troubling, but that sandwich was very dry because neither of us can stand mayonnaise. Great ride anyway.

…

Friday 5/22: Day 5 of biking, to Albany. Despite lots of Tylenol, fever necessitates naps on the side of the highway, start to get taste of blood after swallowing solid food. Failure to complete incredibly delicious burrito is a real trouble sign. Browbeat into going to urgent care.

Saturday 5/23: Day off in Albany–16 hours of sleep! Mono diagnosis at Urgent Care. Irritated that the problem will not be fixed with antibiotics, but kind of happy to have a diagnosis, and a chance to see friends at home.

Sunday 5/24: Idling in Albany–16 hours of sleep! Mom & Dad drive home. Eating solid food again, although bread still gets the hairy eyeball.

Monday 5/25: Idling in Boston–16 hours of sleep. I can eat anything I want again! Stale bread for breakfast just to give my tonsils the middle finger. But then ice cream all day because who needs an excuse to eat ice cream out of the carton.

Tuesday 5/26: Idling in Boston–can’t do more than 8 hours of sleep. Feeling even better than yesterday, but never felt more stir crazy in my life–cannot stop twitching. Plan is to wait until Thursday before leaving the house.

Wednesday 5/27: 12 hours tonight! Cannot wait to leave the house in the morning. Go down to the square to feel productive, move limbs, eat giant M&M cookie, mail Rhiannon bicycle maps. Write lots of email.

(projected) Thursday 5/28: stationary bike, so I do not atrophy and become weak

(projected) Friday 5/29: go to Broadway Bike & use this time to become a competent roadside bike mechanic.

…

(projected) Saturday 6/6: Dad’s birthday fiesta.

[edit after talking to Rhiannon] (loosely projected) Sunday 6/7: meet Rhiannon in CINCINNATI! Not St. Louis! Even though, as Rhiannon notes, “Meet me in Cincinnati” is not a musical like “Meet Me in St. Louis.” But from what I’ve heard of the latter, I’d rather avoid anyone singing it. Reader, you decide:

“Meet me in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the fair,
Don’t tell me the lights are shining
any place but there;
We will dance the Hoochee Koochee,
I will be your tootsie wootsie,
If you will meet in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the fair.”

Hello from Rochester, NY!

So by now you all have heard the bad news about our (temporary) separation while Katie rests up and I do the opposite of resting up – keep pedaling!

The last three days I have been riding with two awesome young women (students at MIT) we happened to meet while couchsurfing in Albany (we were both set to stay with the same family on Saturday night – what a great coincidence!). They were kind enough to let me join them for three lovely days of flat riding through upstate New York, passing through Schenectady, Utica, and Syracuse, among other towns.

A few thoughts so far:

1. Roadkill: there is a LOT of it! Squirrels, possums, raccoons, etc. They are sometimes gory, sometimes covered in flies, and very occasionally flat as a pancake. Mostly they still look almost entirely alive, ready to spring up off the road and scare a passing cyclist.

2. Food: I had my first diner meal of the trip yesterday at Dave’s diner in Schuyler, New York. They had a bunch of memorabilia all over the walls, including a sign proclaiming: Hippies – use the back entrance (no exceptions). I couldn’t quite tell if this was meant to be ironic or not (for FORMAC students: they also had an old UNEEDA Biscuit advertisement posted, and later that day I saw a huge side of the building billboard ad in Syracuse for it!).

3. The kindness of strangers continues to astonish and amaze – from the Memorial Day partiers who offered us beer just before a one-mile long climb to the driver who stopped us today to show us a detour that saved us miles. Mike and Missy of Little Falls, NY, stand out by far for offering us their cabin to sleep in when we knocked on their door to ask about camping near their property. They were in the middle of an impromptu Memorial Day weekend family reunion and they promptly invited us in for dinner.

That’s all for now – it’s past my bedtime (early, I know…). Tomorrow is my first day riding alone, which is both very scary and very exciting. I will be incredibly careful to keep both my physical and mental health intact over the next few days as Katie does the same!

One to Buffalo, One to Boston

So, our whole plan has hit a bit of a hitch, and the crew has temporarily split. No, we have not yet had our first fight (although we keep speculating about what it’ll be)–the problem is disease, specifically mono. On Day 5, which was also kind of a scorcher, the sore throat that has been tickling me since Boston blew up into more of a problem. I was having trouble swallowing, feeling feverish, and exhausted at the top of every hill. Not being entirely lacking in common sense, after some encouragement from my mother, I got myself to urgent care in Albany with the help of our incredible couchsurfing hosts. This time the mono test came back positive.

Fortunately, there are various silver linings. First of all, the bike trip is continuing. The second night we stayed in Albany, another pair of female twenty-something cross-country cyclists stopped in, and expressed interest in riding out together, so Rhiannon has joined them. They are totally great and I think we have a pretty similar ethic about the trip–fairly ungadgety, taking a non-traditional route (different ones, though), low maintenance about proper campgrounds. The main difference is that they have been training since September, where as we only thought of doing this in January and started really training on Monday.

They’re keeping their own blog, which I would link to if only I knew the URL. The plan is that Rhiannon will be traveling with them, if all goes well, up until the Buffalo area, when they’ll be heading into Canada, and Rhiannon will be likely be heading south through Ohio solo, since she has no passport to go to Canada even if she wanted to.

For my part, my parents drove the three hours (only three hours?! it was five days!) from Boston to pick me up, so now I’m home in my kitchen. I’ll get a chance to see a bit more of some of my friends here, and watch entire seasons of Six Feet Under (something which I have fortunately avoided doing at school). I will also be sleeping for at least 12 hours a night with the goal of a speedy recovery, so that I can rejoin Rhiannon somewhere along the road. Because she is a goal-oriented gal, we’ve set the goal of my rejoining by St. Louis, which is both a significant location on our route–the last one before Pueblo, CO–and somewhere that she should reach after about 3 weeks of travel, which is a good recovery estimate for the kind of very mild case of mono that I have.

This all means that Rhiannon is going to be riding solo for a few weeks, unless she can track down a companion somehow or other, of which she seems skeptical. It also calls into question the continuation of our trip blog, since she has been by far the less eager blogger! However, she has made a commitment to updating the blog when possible, since, in her words, she will be “desperate to communicate” and also to reassure everyone that she is not dead. She still refuses to Twitter, though. Hopefully we will hear from her about this. I will now join in heckling her to update, because I want to know what’s up.

Ah! But there are also lots of things to say about the days of riding that preceded this trip-altering event! I will attempt to communicate them in bullet form, in no particular order:

• we had two mega-successful couch surfs, with people who I will not name here lest they have net.privacy concerns, but they were both completely lovely. In Amherst, we stayed with some graduating seniors who shared their falafel & one of their last nights on campus with us. In Albany, where we crashed for an extra unexpected night, we stayed with an incredibly open and generous family who, additionally, were absolutely in love with the place they lived, which made for some wonderful conversations. They also had two incredibly charming children who overcame Rhiannon & my shared reticence around kids, which is a major win.
• free stuff count continues upward: one free night of camping, free New York State bike maps, free cookstove when ours broke.
• we made friends with our first group of bikers–like, big folks on motorcycles–who we met in Windsor, MA, which is an absurd little town at the top of a hill whose two noticeable buildings are a tall, white, eminently New England church steeple and a structure that is simultaneously gas station, general station, and US post office. I have no idea if anyone lives there or not, but it was a wonderful destination after a day of climbing in the Berkshires, which is our first named range of mountains (OK, some people call them hills.)  Most of the time when you are approaching a town, you will be heading downhill, because reasonable pioneers in the 18th/19th century wanted to settle down by a river where there was good farmland and good transit and good weather. But not Windsor!
• A side note on the Berkshires: they are described on a green highway sign thusly: “Welcome to the Berkshires! America’s Premier Cultural Resort!” Har har.
• I’m totally in love with Albany, for a collection of not very interesting reasons that fortunate fellow Aaron Podolny received in a rapturous email. Why do people say bad things about Albany? It is so pretty, and also appears to be the only real city on our route between Boston and Buffalo. The politics seem like they are maybe a little filthy but as a visitor on a bicycle it was pretty great.
• In Western Mass, the Jesus signs had already begun. We were a little freaked out by the overpowering size of the lettering on “When no one cares… JESUS DOES !” and baffled by “Jesus Saves, Government Spends.” That kind of sentiment 1) makes me understand better why Mitt Romney was ever elected governor of Massachusetts and 2) makes me wonder about how the red parts of blue states compare to the red parts of red states, because these parts of Western Mass feels like what I imagine Kansas to be like. My gut feeling is that I am wrong and that Kansas is much worse but Rhiannon advances the alternate hypothesis that red parts of blue states are even redder in reaction, just like blue parts of red states are bluer in reaction (see Austin, TX or Asheville, NC)

Anyway, Rhiannon can take it from here. Go Rhiannon!

39 down, 4600 to go

First day is done, and I’m sitting in lovely Northborough, MA drinking gallons of water after an incredibly sumptuous meal provided by my lovely family here. We planned this to be an easy day given our lack of a training regimen during finals period, and accordingly it wasn’t exactly a killer–we left at noon, a solid two hours after the latest of our potential start times, and arrived by 5PM or so, even though I’m still slightly sick with something or other that is making the lymph nodes in my neck massive (but, according to the good people at Harvard Vanguard, is NOT mono, which believe you me is something of a relief).

After Day 1, I am definitely even more excited than I was when I started. Today we passed by our first farm, our first wide-open field (although, full disclosure: it was across the street from a field of condos), and our first set of adorable suburban mailboxes (one hand-built to look exactly like a USPS mail truck).

I was also pretty gratified about our directions, which did not once lead us astray. Soon we’ll be using the maps we bought from Adventure Cycling and off of our patched-together Google Maps, which has presented us with more bizarre-o bugs than I ever thought something made by the Google team could do, including the tendency to uncontrollably revolve around the entire globe at difficult moments. I now understand why our bike maps cost us more than a hundred dollars, and no longer really begrudge the price: we have probably spent twice as much time planning the route from Boston to Buffalo (which we don’t have maps for) as from Buffalo to Seattle (which we do).

In other news, I am beginning to understand the possible benefit of moving further away from so-called “civilization” though–while climbing kind of a nasty hill today (which I’m sure we will laugh at as positively molehilly in a few weeks), Rhiannon and I were really getting into expressing our pain verbally by yelling things like “AIIE THE BURN!” and “This is so totally LAME” just as we rounded the corner on a woman reading peacefully at the end of her driveway giving us something of a quizzical look. Awkward silence reigned after that, until the giggles burst out and almost caused a man overboard incident. But we made it! One obstacle overcome!

So, from here we’ll be camping one night, then spending a night in Amherst, before heading out on what is likely our first long day, and in the Berkshires to boot. Yeesh!

The Atlantic Coast!

Like Katie said, we went on our final training ride today, loaded up with everything we will be carrying with us for the next three months (which is REALLY not that much …). We looked like quite the characters biking through the middle of Boston with sleeping bags and tents strapped on our bikes.

Here we are about to set off from Katie’s house – don’t worry, we didn’t forget our helmets!

On our ride we went out to the coast – our official startpoint at one end of the country! It wasn’t quite as warm out there, as you can see from our spiffy fleeces:

We made it back from the Atlantic Coast in one piece – next stop, the Pacific…

X-Day minus 36 hours

Today was our last training ride, this time hilariously fully loaded with our gear. We look like pack mules and tip over with absurd ease, which became a problem at various points. It was gorgeous out, in the sense that it was foggy and frigid. As Rhiannon says, we inhaled salt water for the last time for another three months. We contemplated dipping our wheels into the ocean, because apparently it is a thing in the not-insignificant subculture of people who ride bicycles across continents. But it was too hard to get our bikes to the water and we had real fear that we would not be able to get them back up the stairs with all the gear. So instead we just took a picture near the water, which would be enclosed, but it isn’t. Maybe Rhiannon will post it later.

It was the first time I used my new clipless pedals:

which are one of the most gadgety-biker items in my repertoire at the moment. There are these special shoes that snap into them kind of like ski boots, and you get a ton of extra power. Basically the effect of the shoes is to make me feel like a centaur: part machine, part flesh. Maybe that is more like an android. Anyway it is great except I did a few of those narcoleptic style body slams to the ground. It is all good though I am not broken.

So: we are leaving Monday in a blaze of glory from my house, heading to stay with some extended family about 35 miles away. Planning on taking it pretty slow for the first week and a half as we get our “bicycle legs,” which will take us to about Niagara Falls before we kick it into high gear, by which I actually mean low gear because we will be getting ready for hills.

Leave us comments, we want to hear from you! Or link us to your own blogs. We will read them whenever we hit up a public library with non-excruciating internet access (i.e. rarely). We are trying to escape but we do not want to escape from you guys!

ROUTE PLANNING

This trip is starting to feel more and more real – in the last four days we have been to two bike shops, two outdoor stores, three optometrists, one hardware store, and three ice cream shops. We have bought (almost) everything we need to start our trip, and we have officially planned the first TEN DAYS of our route (from Boston to Buffalo via NIAGARA FALLS), complete with couch surfing and camping plans.

This is our most exciting purchase, which was made with the assistance of two adorable slash really awkward EMS employees who may or may not have given us an unauthorized $25 discount on an $80 product for no reason as far as we could see. Hopefully this trend of free stuff will continue.

We are so excited to make dinner with it tomorrow in Katie’s backyard. We might even sleep in the tent. We also had to buy an accompanying massive tin of white gas to fuel it, which for some reason made us both oddly giddy (not the fumes even).

In other news, due to Katie’s inability to navigate the streets of her hometown (3+ hours spent driving in circles and counting…), we have determined that Rhiannon will navigate the trip (this is also because of her totally SWEET handlebar bag with a clear plastic cover perfect for holding maps). Today also saw that first rush of mechanical glee, as we attached a rearview mirror and an odometer to Rhiannon’s bike, which involved the use of SEVERAL tools.

Tomorrow we will saddle up both bikes for the first time and hopefully attempt to wobble down Katie’s street at 2 mph.

Google Maps route and HOW YOU CAN HELP.

Finals are almost over, we’re leaving for Boston in 2 days to begin bicycle boot camp, and STILL I have trouble rattling off the states we’ll be passing through (my knowledge of the midwest is a little hairy, which is after all one of the reasons we are going on this trip). So I made a Google Maps rendition of the general direction we’ll be heading. Check it out.

We paid $120(!) for some sweet maps from Adventure Cycling which claim to point out every campsite, bike shop, and scary stretch of highway. So theoretically our route is mapped right down to the “left at Church St, continue for 0.1 miles” level (although yes, we will be cross-checking our directions with GMaps).

To the point:
Do you know anyone anywhere along the way who would want to lend us a bed, futon, floor space, or backyard? GIVE A HOLLER at kathreen.harrison@gmail.com or rhiannon.bronstein@gmail.com. Or leave a comment. Camping along the highway is great, but all of the things mentioned above are much, much better, and we would gladly deviate at least a coupla miles for them. Also, if you or anyone else wants to join us for a stretch of the way…GIVE A HOLLER. Rhiannon is way charming, but an occasional third (or more) set of wheels would be so great. RIDE WITH US!