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.

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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!

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