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!
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Boston to Seattle or Bust 