Answering a few questions

Monday, May 14th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 5 Comments.

Since we’ve returned to Wisconsin, we’ve been peppered with questions by many people about various aspects of our trip.  I figured a few of you might be interested to know these answers too, so here we go!

Day one: September 1, 2011 (trying to put on brave faces)

How many miles and how many months?
About 3,500 miles over eight months, six of which were heavy riding months.  Not bad, eh?

What was your official route?
We started in Madison (WI), rode to Chicago, across Indiana diagonally to Cincinnati (OH), my parents gave us a lift to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee (where they were headed anyway), rode across Georgia diagonally to Savannah by way of Atlanta, then down through Florida by way of Orlando and Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, rented a car and drove from the Everglades to Tampa, rode to Gulf Shores (AL) for Christmas with Rachel’s family, across Mississippi to Gonzales (LA) and took a bus to New Orleans for a few days, rode from Gonzales to Austin (TX).

Then we took a month off and flew to Wisconsin in February.

We came back to Austin and biked across Texas to just south of Lubbock on the New Mexico border, hitched a ride to Roswell (NM) because of 40MPH headwinds (50mph gusts), rented a car in Roswell and drove to White Sands National Monument and Carlsbad Caverns, got picked up in Roswell by Rachel’s cousin in Albuquerque, rented a car and drove to the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert, flew from Albuquerque to Paso Robles (CA) because the Rockies were still frozen, biked up the California coast to Santa Cruz, got a ride with Rachel’s family to Sonoma.  I’m exhausted just recalling all of this!!

Jess riding near Orlando, FL

How many miles a day did you average?
I’d say between 45-55 is a good estimate. The least we ever did was 10, the most 77.

How many flats did you get/did any of your gear break down?
Jess’ flat count: 4
Rachel’s flat count: 6

All of our gear, except for Rachel’s second set of tires (I’m looking at YOU, Bontrager!!!) held up great!  I replaced my tires in southern Georgia (but they were already almost a year old by the time I left on the bike trip), and I replaced my chain, shifting cables, and brake pads in Tampa.

Rachel replaced her shifting cables in southern Georgia.

Over all, our bikes rode great for all 3,500 miles.  We became pretty good champs at changing flats (especially Rachel, who once changed a flat 1 mile from our hotel in pouring rain and thunder after riding 60 miles).

Rachel changing a flat in Louisiana

How much did your bikes weigh?
Mine weighed 105 lbs when I left (35 lbs bike + 70 lbs worth of gear)
Rachel’s weighed 100 lbs (30 lbs bike + 70 lbs worth of gear)

By the time we arrived in Sonoma (CA), my bike weighed 92 lbs (35 lbs bike + 57 lbs gear) and Rachel’s weighed 85 lbs (30 lbs bike + 55 lbs gear).

Are you guys in crazy awesome shape?
Our legs muscles are definitely stronger than when we left, and who knows how much fat we lost vs how much muscle we gained, but we both weigh about the same as when we left.  The truth is, it’s actually pretty difficult to lose weight bike touring.  With how much we’re using our bodies every day, we really have to eat enough calories or else we just felt like crap.  Also, visiting a new place always means trying the local fare.  As Rachel wrote earlier, we ate some pretty fattening foods on our trip, but man was it delicious!

Did you meet any bad people?
Not a one.  Maybe we were just lucky for eight months, but we really had to get used to accepting goodwill from strangers without giving anything but stories, smiles and thanks in return.

Our Couchsurfing hosts in Austin

Did you ever get into any bad or dangerous situations?
Well, we did have a few nights where we camped in some iffy spots.  Once it was a very cold (below 30 degrees) night on private hunting land and we could hear gun shots from people practice shooting in Florida.

Another time in Texas it was raining  and 45 degrees while we were riding with a monstrous head wind.  Hypothermia was a legitimate concern, so we found an abandoned barn to pitch our tent in for the night.  I slept with ear plugs in because the metal barn door kept slamming in the wind, but Rachel had trouble sleeping that night because she could hear rats going through our things.

Did you ever get hurt?
I flipped over my handlebars in Texas during a rain storm and banged my knees up pretty badly.  Rachel sprained her ankle getting off the bus at the Grand Canyon.  I’d say we were both very lucky.

Where did you sleep at night?
It depended.  Sometimes we’d walk our bikes into the woods or behind a power booster station or behind a doctor’s office or church and free camp (and we were never bothered).  Sometimes we’d knock on peoples’ doors and ask if we could pitch the tent in their yard (which actually had a surprising success rate).  Sometimes we’d pay for camping at a state or national park or private campground.  Sometimes (especially if it had been several days without a shower or if it was going to be especially cold) we’d stay in a motel.  Sometimes we’d stay with amazing family or friends.  Sometimes we’d use couchsurfing.org and stay with amazing strangers.

A beautiful (and secluded) spot behind a graveyard in Texas

What was your favorite place you visited?
Now that’s a tough question!  I’m serious when I say it was all wonderful.  I will try to answer this though!!

Our favorite city on the whole trip was hands-down New Orleans.  Not only did we get to spend some great time with Rachel’s cousins in Gonzales, but also the couple we stayed with in New Orleans were so much fun and really showed us the best parts of the city.  It’s just a really cool, really humble city with a fascinating history and music scene.  The food was also BY FAR the best I’ve eaten on this whole trip.  We definitely plan on going back many times (and will just have to plan on gaining at least 5 lbs every time we go!).  Heck, we’d seriously consider moving to NOLA if it weren’t for the extremely hot summers.

Atlanta comes in at a very close second, because the bike people we met there were amazing and really made us feel at home and showed off their city to us by bike.  Our host was fantastic and helped us get acquainted with tons of interview subjects.  Also I rediscovered chicken wings there after being a vegetarian for six years!

Other favorite places include Blue Springs State Park in Florida where we serendipitously got to swim with Manatees, the Smoky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, White Sands National Monument, all of Route 1 in California (because all of it is GORGEOUS), Yosemite National Park, and Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks.  Parts of Texas were also surprisingly very beautiful, too.

What was your least favorite place you visited?
Not a tough one at all!  South Florida and the Everglades.  Do I need to remind you what a total emotional breakdown looks like??

What did you eat?
As a foodie who loves cooking in a full kitchen, cooking with two pans and an alcohol stove was definitely one of the hardest parts of this trip for me.  Fresh fruits and vegetables just don’t keep long when they’re unrefrigerated + banging around in a kitty litter bucket for eight hours a day.  Thus, our diet while on the road consisted mostly of: flour tortillas (which you can actually do a lot with!), peanut butter, Nutella, various types of jam, trail mix/dried fruit, kale, carrots, rice, canned beans, sometimes Ramen (mixed with veggies), green beans with garlic and mustard, rice cakes, bagged Indian curries, bagged soup mixes, beef jerky, sliced beef from Wal Mart (please don’t judge us!!!), cold noodle salad with romaine, and mac and cheese.

I also went through a kick for a while where I was making vegetable (instead of chicken) and dumplings with dry pancake mix.  Once I made avocado sushi with nothing but nori paper, rice, honey, and avocado.  It actually turned out pretty well!  As the resident chef, I tried really hard to be creative and make food as nutritious as possible, but it was extremely difficult.

Flour tortilla + butter + cinnamon + maple syrup = bike touring french toast

Sushi in Big Sur

Rice with fresh ginger and garlic, lemon juice, kale, mushrooms, and carrots

What will you never eat again?
Basically everything I just listed above.

Would you do this trip again?
Probably not.  Not because we didn’t have an amazing, life-changing experience filled with the most wonderful people imaginable.  More because long-term travel is just too exhausting and not for us.  We are glad we did this and proud of ourselves for doing this, and now we know what a long-term adventure is really like.  I think two to four weeks is a good length for traveling, whether it’s bike touring, hiking, or just visiting a new place.

What’s next?
Good question!  For now we are working on our book for the trip, editing more interviews (and possibly even filming more interviews, because really– why stop just because we aren’t touring?), and catching up with family.  We have a wedding to go to in June, and then we’re heading back to Boston in late July where we will look for work.

We have tons of gear to review, and we plan on going on bike tours and other adventures still so no worries– Against the Grind will continue!  Thanks for coming along with us on this crazy, amazing ride!  If you have any questions here that we didn’t answer, feel free to comment below!

Candid photo from our GoPro in Florida

Photos from the California Coast!

Monday, May 7th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. 1 Comment.

Ok, we LOVED this whole bike trip (mostly).  Every part of the country is pretty freakin’ cool.  However, a small part of us is kicking ourselves for not biking the California coast earlier so we’d have more energy to bike the whole thing.

The two of us somewhat relieved to be out of the desert.

Here I am pedaling through paradise!!

Ocean-carved arches south of Morro Bay.

Elephant seals preserving their energy.

Big Sur is gorgeous!

Here's Rachel with her feet in the Pacific!

Yes, the water really IS that color.

Until we meet again, Pacific Coast!  We’ll be back!

Biking the Pacific Coast

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. No Comments.

I know we said last week that we’re wrapping up our bike trip, but I just wanted to take a moment to tell you how AMAZING biking the pacific coast is.  Yes, the hills are killer and the close cliff drops could make anyone’s stomach fall out, BUT it was hands-down the most beautiful riding we did over our 7.5 months on the road.

We started out just north of Cambria.  As Rachel wrote in our last post, the wind was howling something fierce that day– so much so that we couldn’t even pay attention to the gorgeous cliffs and bright blue ocean.  The next day with the winds died down we finally had the opportunity to truly enjoy the last leg of our trip.

The pacific coast is a great bike route not only because of the gorgeous views of ocean and redwoods, but also because there are just so many other bike tourists on the road.  Our first day out (and then again and again and again over many days because we were going the same way and kept leapfrogging each other), we met Don, who started in Santa Monica and was biking back up to his house in Eugene, OR.  We also met Daniel, a German (shout out to Rachel’s motherland!) who started in San Francisco and was biking down the California coast and then across the country to New York (sounds somewhat familiar).  We also met Melissa and her lovely friends who were support vehicle-ing for her while she biked from Big Sur to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.  It was really refreshing to see so many people traveling by bicycle.

Rachel and Daniel

I feel like I should be bummed we’re not biking all the way up into Oregon, but with us being exhausted and with so much to see in Northern California (and a Milwaukee Brewers vs San Francisco Giants game to see), I feel really great about our choices.  We ended on a truly beautiful note.  And, provided there are no major earthquakes, the California coast will always be here for us to return to.

What month off???

Sunday, March 11th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. No Comments.

Holy moly did we really just spend a month off the bikes???  Seems like just a long weekend.  We flew from Austin, TX back to Verona, WI on January 31 to take a month off.  The main reasons for this are as follows:

1. We had a film gig at a conference Rachel’s mom was running in Minneapolis.  We got paid in the Adobe Production Premium Suite!  Our editing is now LIGHT YEARS better compared to Final Cut 6 in case any of you video editing geeks cared to know.
2. We wanted to give the Rocky Mountains a chance to thaw out before we attempted a crossing.
3. Texas is REALLY BIG and we wanted to give ourselves a break after 5 straight months on the bikes.

This is our friend Monet completely losing it at a filming of "Hardcore Pawn" in Detroit.

Permission Slips

Monday, February 6th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Bike Tour Preparations, Mini-Adventure, Personal Stories. No Comments.

I know this sounds obvious, but dropping your current life and embarking on an extended bike tour is no easy task.  People continuously marvel at Rachel and I with our adventures ahead and behind us, remarking “I wish I could do something like that!”  SO many people want to bike tour.  Why aren’t more people doing it?  The excuses are countless: I have a full-time job (so did we!  You can take it as an opportunity to change career tracks, or take an extended leave of absence, or take the risk that you’ll be applying for jobs once you’re finished; but chances are you won’t regret having an adventure once it’s all said and done); I have a mortgage to pay (rent it out– it’s a great way to generate income while traveling!); I have kids (take them with you! What better way for them to learn about the world?  Many families bike tour together!); I can’t afford a $2,000 touring bike (we’ve seen people touring and having an amazing time on mountain bikes, $50 beach cruisers, and Razor scooters– any bike will suffice, I promise!).

And this doesn’t just apply to bike touring.

Getting up the nerve to achieve our goals and live out our dreams is extremely difficult.  I know this first hand, because if it weren’t for Rachel I would still be sitting at my desk job in Boston thinking, “Someday, I’m going to ride my bike across the country!”  I knew I wanted to have an adventure like this, and I knew that life was about much more than working 40-45 hours a week.  But I think deep down, I was waiting for someone to come along and give me permission to take the leap.  I think deep down we’re ALL waiting around for someone to come along and hand us permission slips to live out our dreams.  I was so incredibly lucky to have Rachel come into my life and demand, “What the hell are you waiting for?  Let’s make this bike trip happen!”  Rachel’s the type of person who recognizes that if we want to change our situations, no one’s going to come along and do it for us.  So why waste time being unhappy or unsatisfied?

Not everyone has a supportive person to co-pilot through your adventure planning like I did, so I’m going to try to reach through the Internet tubes and give you a hand: I know this is all easy to say, but it’s not so easy to act on.  That’s where learning to act a bit more impulsively comes in handy.  I know, I know.  You got to where you are today by being very calculated in your decision-making process.  You went to school and followed all the rules, and then snagged yourself a big kid job.  I did that, too!  But sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.  Otherwise you might end up 5, 10, 15, 20 years later still saying, “Someday I’m going to do __________!”

And one of the wonderful side effects of taking the leap and achieving your goal is that more aspirations crop up.  Only this time, they seem much more manageable and not out of reach.  After all, you’ve already risked everything and the outcome was amazing.  You knew it would be– it was just that giving yourself permission to take the plunge was scary.  Do you honestly think you’ll go to your deathbed saying, “Gosh, I wish I hadn’t bike toured for a year when I was in my 20s!”, or “What a waste of time backpacking through India was!”, or “I wish I’d experienced less of the world”?

Tearin’ Through the Deep South!

Monday, January 9th, 2012 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. No Comments.

Since spending Christmas in Gulf Shores, Alabama with Rachel’s family, we’ve now biked across Mississippi and are currently staying with Rachel’s cousins in Gonzales, Louisiana (which is about halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans).  It took us seven days to get here, in which we ran the whole gamut of paying for a camp site, stealth camping, and paying for several motels because of an intense cold streak that billowed across the country.  Normally I hate shelling out money for a motel, but I refuse to camp in temperatures below freezing.  Sure, our Big Agnes Lulu sleeping bags are guaranteed to keep us alive down to 15 degree weather, but I’d rather not shiver the whole night if I don’t have to.

Rachel’s parents gave me the Adventure Cycling Association’s awesome Southern Tier map set for Christmas, so Rachel and I are following that route to California from here on out.  Our first day leaving Gulf Shores on December 29 took us on a ferry across Mobile Bay, where we got to see tons of oil rigs.  Call me stupid, but I always imagined oil rigs as boats, when in fact they are very much stationary.  Rachel and I were both expecting to see tons of oil globules floating across the bay from BP’s disaster in 2010, but this was also not so.  The water looked pretty clear as far as I could tell, and we even saw dolphins swimming in the bay.  We left Gulf Shores pretty late in the day, so that night we just paid for a lovely campsite at Dauphin Island Campground.

The next day (December 30) we biked across the rest of Alabama and stopped for the night to camp in a church graveyard about two miles from the Mississippi border.  It was the Friday night before New Years Eve and we really weren’t expecting anyone to go to church or visit the graveyard.  We were wrong on both counts.  As I was putting pans away after dinner, we noticed all the lights come on in the church and a woman and a small girl walking through the graveyard.  I wasn’t even being particularly quiet (Rachel had to “shush” me several times).  So then we were faced with the delima of, “Do we introduce ourselves and say, ‘Hello we’re camping in your graveyard for the evening’ and risk getting asked to leave when it’s pitch black out?”; or “Do we stay in the tent and hope they don’t call the cops and if they find us beg for forgiveness?”  We decided to opt for the latter, and even though the graveyard was small and we weren’t well hidden, either no one saw us or no one cared.  Regardless, I still had strange dreams about the ghost of Bob Hope coming to get me in the night.

We spent New Years Eve biking 63 miles into Mississippi to party it up in the Wiggins Hampton Inn.  And by “party it up”, I mean order a pizza, watch Kathy Griffin make Anderson Cooper blush on CNN, and fall asleep by approximately 12:01am.  Bike touring isn’t always exciting adventure, folks!  We stayed an extra day at the Hampton Inn so I could start the New Year off right by getting some video editing done (it’s finished!  New video up soon, I promise!) and also because the cold temperatures were starting to sweep in.

January 2, we biked into Louisiana.  Again, it was supposed to be freezing at night so we shelled out $40 to stay at one of those scary motels where people live there and argue openly in the parking lot very loudly and the deadbolt on your door is flimsy.  There were some questionable stains on the mattress, so Rachel and I ended up sleeping (very cozily, at least!) in our sleeping bags on top of the bed.  Oh Bogalusa.  What a lovely welcome into Louisiana.

January 3 was still in the upper 20s at night, so we stayed at a slightly nicer motel in Covington.  It was pretty windy (in the wrong direction) that day, so we took it easy and stopped early so we could use the internet and get some work done.

The next day we biked a very lazy 32 miles to Punkin Park Campground in Hammond.  On the way we stopped for lunch at a delicious soul food diner and Rachel had her first real chicken and dumplings.  I was pretty glad the weather had finally warmed up enough to camp again.  It’s weird, but I’m finding that I sleep better in the tent than in the motels.  I also have WAY less allergy issues when I’m camping outside instead of sleeping in a dusty/mildewy motel room.

January 5 we made it to Rachel’s cousin’s house in Gonzales!  It’s been great spending the last few days hanging out with Titus and his wife and eating amazing Cajun food (like grilled oysters) and drinking the local beer and trying legit home-brewed moonshine for the first time (not brewed by Spring and Titus, though).  Yesterday we interviewed an amazing high school student in Baton Rouge who created a video that went viral about the injustices of child marriages and the importance of education for girls.  Gabriella is AWESOME and I can’t wait to edit our interview with her!

Tomorrow we’re going to New Orleans, where we hope to get a few more interviews before we head west for Austin, Texas.  Stay tuned for more updates!

Not to sound dramatic or anything, but I’m pretty sure we just spent two weeks in Hell.

Monday, December 5th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Riding. 7 Comments.

I know I probably sound like an enormous wimp to cry on my website that riding through south Florida in November was Hell.  “South Florida?  The land of sunshine and fresh squeezed orange juice and senior citizens and key lime pie and delicious Cuban food….is Hell?”  Lesson of the last two weeks: adjust your expectations of this bike trip to having NO expectations.

As Rachel wrote earlier, things started going downhill for us after we left Orlando.  The scenery went from Disney World to stagnant swamp in about a day’s worth of riding.  We were imagining our ride to the Everglades would include passing through cute towns where we could buy fresh orange juice and key lime pie and try Cuban food for the first time.  What we discovered is we were lucky if we even came across a gas station that had clean water to drink.  What made it even worse was that there was hardly anywhere to stay the night.  Looking at the map, we were surrounded by nature preserves.  “Great!”, we initially thought.  We could just camp in the nature preserves like we did across Georgia.  Well unless we wanted to pitch the tent in an alligator-filled swamp, we quickly realized that this would be impossible.

With few options, we ended up making due with what we had:

• Spending a night camping on a very small island in an alligator-infested swamp of an airboat tour company.  It was only $13 and there was no drinkable water.  BUT!  The managers said we could use the shower they had.  We had been riding for several days with strong head winds and rain and were covered in dirt the road was spitting up at us, so we jumped at this opportunity.  We should have rethought this idea when the manager literally had to break the padlock to the shower with a bolt cutter because the shower hadn’t been used in so long that the lock would no longer open and there were disagreements among the employees about what the combination was anyway.  The manager then advised us to pour some bleach in the brown (but maybe was once white or yellow?) shower from the spider web-encrusted Clorox bottle (which included mummified spider remains) lying next to the shower.  The manager then reminded us not to drink the shower water because it’s pumped directly from the swamp.  We showered anyway. (Yes, we were THAT dirty)

• We camped in a dude’s yard on Lake Okeechobee.  Call me jaded, but I’ve never seen so many terrifyingly bright colored enormous spiders in my entire life.  I will probably still have nightmares about them years from now.  The guy was nice.  He was older and lived alone and moved to the area from New York City to retire on the lake.  He asked us if we wanted to drink wine with him and we politely said “no”.  He ended up bringing us a bottle anyway and Rachel and I wiped the mold off the outside lip and drank it anyway.  It was a German riesling.  Not too bad.  We laid in the tent with the rainfly off and looked at the millions of stars (and a few shooting stars) and listened to the hum of the mosquitoes outside.  The next day while taking a break from riding, I opened up my handlebar bag to discover about 3 dozen (very large) fire ants all over the inside flap.  In the panic that ensued, Rachel urged me to put the filthy socks I had drying on top of my pannier on my hands to knock them away.  It worked, but I’m still picking red ant pieces out of the wool.

• When we finally came across a real campground with a real shower and a real laundry facility in South Bay, we were beyond excited.  To add to this, there was an air conditioned rec room where we met another bike touring couple who have already biked across the country….(are you ready for this?)…..on $50 beach cruisers.  Proof, my friends, that you don’t need a $2,000 bike to tour comfortably.  Jess and Dan were so cool– we traded stories from the road and talked about our plans for the future.  They’re planning to hike the entire Appalachian trail in March, and after seeing how well they manage on so little and hearing stories about running out of water in the desert and still making it through, I have no doubts that they’ll make it to Maine.  If Rachel and I are half-feral from our 3 months of traveling to the point that we’re willing to sleep in an alligator pit and shower in swamp water, Jess and Dan are straight up wild.  Meeting them was the silver lining that was our trip to south Florida.

• Then, of course as you’ve already read, we ended up staying at the Miccosukee Indian Casino for a night because we’d ridden for way too long without seeing anything but swamp on a very narrow (but very busy) road with no shoulder and a strong headwind.  Rachel had an emotional meltdown and was very close to ending the trip, and we scheduled to rent a car to drive us the hell out.

I’m not exactly sure why I thought that after riding a week through nothing but swamp, that I would get to the Everglades National Park and it would look different.  Because it didn’t.  Except for the fact that there were even more mosquitoes and even bigger fire ants than at Lake Okeechobee.  We had already booked and paid for a week of camping there, so we were sort of stuck.  When we checked in at the ranger station, both rangers on duty remarked, “Wow!  You’re staying here a LONG time!” 

Apparently, we came to the Everglades at the wrong time.  We thought we had beat the Thanksgiving crowd when we biked the 45 miles from the entrance into the Flamingo campground several days before Thanksgiving and there were only 2 other tents set up in the whole campground.  Over the week, this number grew to maybe 12 tents at most (and the campground is very large).  It was very hot and humid and there was no shade or shelter anywhere and in the morning and evening the mosquitoes were bad enough to drive you completely mad.  We started eating dinner at 4pm to make sure we had enough time to clean up and scramble in the tent for the night before we got eaten alive.

We had read online that there was a very good restaurant at the park, complete with a delicious breakfast buffet so we were excited at the prospect of at least eating something besides powdered soup and tortillas for another week.  This excitement was crushed when we rode the 45 miles into the park and discovered that the restaurant was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma  in 2005 and hadn’t been rebuilt.    

THEN, a vulture sat on our tent and broke a 1-inch chunk out of one of our tent poles.  Thank god Rachel’s German and we all know they’re excellent engineers, because she managed to somewhat fix it with a coke can and duct tape.

We bought ridiculous bug net shirts so we could try to hike some of the trails without the mosquitoes devouring us, only to discover that because it was still the off-season the trails were all completely grown over and unsafe to walk because of the risk of stepping on a cobra nest or something of the like.  This was on Thanksgiving, and we were so tired and defeated we decided to just make sandwiches for dinner to eat in the tent.  It’s amazing how when you’re completely cutoff from the world (we had no phone reception and didn’t have internet obviously) major holidays like Thanksgiving don’t seem real.  It was just another hot, humid, mosquitoey, lacking-in-shade day at Everglades National Park.

The next day around 2pm, Rachel decided she wanted to make Thanksgiving dinner for real.  She peeled the two sweet potatoes we bought the week before and chopped them up, put them in a pot, filled it with water, and discovered it was so incredibly windy that our stove wouldn’t stay lit.  With no other shelter options, we loaded up our arms and pockets with the food, stove, utensils, etc and walked to the women’s bathroom to cook our day-late Thanksgiving dinner (which really ended up consisting of soggy croutons and mashed sweet potatoes with vegetable oil…sorry, Rachel).  We set the pot and stove up on the sink right next to the automatic hand dryer that kept roaring to life with hurricane-force winds every time we stirred.  That’s when I had my meltdown.  Our lives just felt so sad.  The people we meet always tell us stuff like, “You’re living the dream!”  Whose dream was this?  I hadn’t cried that hard in years.  I was ready to quit.  Anything just to get out of the heat, lack of shade, mosquitoes, and humidity.  And then I was angry at myself for wanting to quit.  For wanting to throw away everything Rachel and I spent over a year preparing for.

In the end, I think it was the pep talks from strangers we met at the campground that kept us going.  Everyone told us we had to keep going, that it would get better.  That we’d feel better once we were somewhere else.  They were right.  Rachel was deliriously happy when we picked up the rental car in Homestead.  I was mostly just shell shocked still.  After spending several days in St. Pete’s Beach in Tampa with Rachel’s mom (who happened to be in the area for a conference) and finally eating lots of delicious Cuban food and key lime pie, I’m feeling much better.  Seeing the reactions we received from our latest video that we posted has completely re-energized both of us.

I know it’s a little late for doing the whole, “What are you thankful for this year?” thing, but I just wanted to express my sincere gratitude to our friends and families and our readers (who are really just super awesome friends we haven’t met yet) for not only putting up with us, but also supporting us as we learn the hard lessons of life, like the fact that sometimes even bike touring really sucks.  You guys are all real gems and are giving us the strength to pedal ourselves West.  Thank you.

PS: Don’t feel bad if you laughed while you read this post.  Rereading it now, we’re laughing too.  Ahh, life!

Atlanta to Savannah

Monday, October 31st, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

Greetings from St. Simons Island, Georgia!  It was an exciting trip to get here, which included a few days stay in Savannah.  I’ll try to recap a bit here:

We left our awesome friend Kyle in Atlanta and headed southeast.  We meant to bike 40 miles a day and make it to Savannah in 6 days.  However, between the hills (did you know many parts of Georgia have a TON of steep hills?  Yeah, neither did we…) and each of us getting sick (not at the same time, though– that would be too easy), we were delayed a day in our arrival.

Rachel and I with our very awesome (and very tall) friend Kyle in Atlanta

I’m realizing more and more on this trip that bike touring is all about serendipity.  Our first day out from Atlanta, Rachel felt like crap.  We thought it was allergies and the hills, but it turned out to be a pretty nasty cold.  We made it only 25 miles to the town of Conyers before Rachel was ready to collapse.  We were taking a break outside of a grocery store when a car drove up behind us and stopped.  “Oh crap, it’s a dude who’s going to ask us if we have a flat tire or something”, I thought.  Instead, a woman got out of the car.  Charlotte was an avid bicyclist with a niece who just finished hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.  She was so thankful to the strangers who took in her niece during her trip, that she wanted to pay it forward and offered us her guest bedroom for the night.  We were hesitant at first, because in our minds we had 20 more miles to go.  However, Rachel was feeling worse by the minute so we took her up on the offer.  And I’m so glad we did!  Charlotte and her partner Jan were awesome.  Not only did we get taken out to dinner, but they had a huge breakfast for us the next morning.  What’s more, Charlotte is from Florida and knows folks where we’re going and arranged people for us to stay with when we get to Miami and the Everglades.

Rachel and Charlotte (who rode with us for a bit)

Charlotte and Jan rescue dogs that are dumped out in the country and find homes for them (many times up north), so we had a great time playing with all six of their dogs.  Rachel and I have decided we want to adopt one of their dogs once we’re finished with the bike trip and are settled somewhere for longer than a few months.  Maybe in three years or so?

From Jan and Charlotte’s we biked another 43 miles before stopping in the Oconee National Forest where we stayed in the backyard of a man named Judd on the day before deer hunting season.  Judd was a swell, backwoodsy kind-of-guy who liked to hunt deer in his own back yard.  He was excited for our trip, but admitted he’d “beat our asses” if we were his daughters– “Don’t you know there’s crazy people out there???”  His old job used to consist of stringing telephone wires all over Georgia, so he knew the back roads well.  His girlfriend was really sweet and told me that if we’re ever passing through the area again, to remember that we have family there now and not to hesitate to stay with them again.

Five miles after leaving Jud’s I got a flat tire.  It’s a good thing I listened during my bike maintenance class in Boston about how to patch a flat, because the spare tubes I was sold were for 700c tires (even though I know I distinctly remember telling the sales person that I ride 26″ wheels).  By the time I finally took all the stuff off my bike, flipped it over, took off the wheel, took off the tire, found the whole in the tube, patched it, and put everything back together again, well over an hour had passed.  Combined with the fact that the high that day was in the upper 80s and the hills just kept getting bigger, we stopped early for the day and got our first motel room of the trip in Milledgeville (which is apparently Georgia’s former state capital).

It wasn’t until the next day while camped out in an elderly couple’s front yard that I started to get sick.  We’ve discovered it’s too easy to pass off legitimate sickness as allergies while bike touring.  “Of course we’re tired and our bones hurt!  We’ve been biking all day!”  I thought I was allergic to the tree we were sleeping under, because I spent the whole night not being able to breathe at all.  The next day was 90 degrees out and I felt awful.  We only biked 40 miles that day, but it was absolutely the hardest day for me this whole trip.  Between the heat, the hills, my fever, and the fact that I couldn’t breathe, I was completely miserable.  By the time we rolled into Swainsboro and were trying to find the Best Western, I was sobbing uncontrollably.  The water I was drinking was hot.  I just couldn’t get myself to cool down.  We ended up giving up 1/2 of a mile from the Best Western and settling for a seedy/smokey room at a really cheap motel because I needed a cold shower asap.

The next day I felt much better and we managed to bike 45 miles to basically the middle of nowhere.  Lo and behold: the earth flattened out!  I don’t think this town even had a name, but it was 45 miles outside of Savannah, which is why we decided to stop there for the night.  The churches in the area were all a bit too exposed for camping, so we “settled” on staying in the vast front yard of a mansion.  The matron of the house was very sweet and gave us free range of her well water.  Rain hammered on the tent all night, but we were warm and dry inside.  The next morning we hung out with two of the guys who were working on renovating the house.  We told them about or trip and they told us about their lives.  We remarked about how nice and flat it had gotten and one of them responded with, “In this town there’s a road called Rich Man’s Hill, because you’d have to be a REALLY rich man to own a hill in this part of Georgia!”

Woke up the next morning to a little tree frog trying to hitch a free ride on my pannier. I don't think so, buddy!

Savannah was great!  We stayed with a wonderful couchsurfing.org host named Erin and her giant, but very sweet (although incredibly flatulent) french bull dog, Petunia.  Savannah has a very old, but quaint southern feel to it.  We checked out the Colonial Park Cemetery, stood in front of Flannery O’Connor’s house (it was closed and cost money so I doubt we would have gone in anyway), walked along the Savannah River, and took a day bus to Tybee Island, where we then biked to Fort Pulaski, stood in the Atlantic Ocean, and ate THE BEST BARBECUE EVER.

It took us two days to bike to St. Simons Island, where we’re now having a great time staying with family friends of mine.  We’ve spent the time video editing, checking out the local sights, and interviewing kick ass inspiring women.  We even made the local paper!  Next stop: Orlando!

Atlanta: The Secretly Awesome City

Monday, October 17th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

I’m going to be honest, here: neither of us wanted to go to Atlanta.  Growing up in east Tennessee, I only traveled to Atlanta to fly out of the international airport for cheaper.  Rachel only ever got as far as Acworth to visit her grandfather, which, after biking through it last week, I can safely say it isn’t a town to brag about.  However, Rachel really wanted to visit Savannah (we’ve heard such nice things about it!), and the best way to avoid biking through the Appalachian mountains from the Smokys was to bike around them and through Atlanta.

I reached out to a friend I knew in college who’s a huge bike geek here in Atlanta.  Not only did he offer Rachel and I his entire apartment for the week while he stayed with his girlfriend down the street, but he also contacted every bicycling person he knew in the area to meet with us and give us leads on people to interview.  Thanks, Kyle!!  The people he introduced us to welcomed us with open arms, and we spent a lovely evening bicycling around Atlanta with several of them.  I forgot how much fun it is to bike through a city with a large group of people at night!

Between Kyle’s contacts and the effort of another friend of a friend, we got close to 100 email requests from women interested in being interviewed for our film project!  We simply didn’t have time to meet all of them, so we picked a promising handful and are very excited with the footage we’ve gotten.  We met Jill, a recovered bulimic now raising two teenage daughters in a world in which she believes the pressures young women feel are worse than ever before.  We also met Carol, a homemaker in the midst of menopause searching for paid employment for the first time in decades.  Then there was Sara, a breast cancer survivor/entrepreneur/endurance athlete, who incorporated bicycling into her recovery process.  I’m not going to give away the other interviews we got, because every one of them was just as inspiring as these women.

I’m finally feeling like we’re onto something right.  Or at least on the way to on to something right.  I just hope we can have as good of luck down the road.  Atlanta has definitely been our favorite city, so far.  Who the hell would have thought?  Thank you for your hospitality, Atlanta!  We owe you a big one!

Here I Am

Thursday, October 6th, 2011 Posted by Jessica. Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 3 Comments.

Atlanta, GA.

I know this blog post has been needed for a long time now, considering Rachel and I are now into month 2 of our bicycling adventures together.  The truth is, everything I’ve been experiencing since September 1 has been incredibly (wonderfully) overwhelming.

I left September 1st from Verona, WI utterly terrified.  It’s probably hard to tell from our first video from the road, but I was almost crying as I hugged Rachel’s family goodbye.  I just didn’t know if we could do it.  I thought for sure our kitty litter buckets would fall off our bikes at mile 2 and one of us would crash into a ditch because of all the weight on our bikes.  On all the bike blogs I read before our trip, everyone advised to load up our bikes with all of our gear and go for a short test ride overnight somewhere.  Well, we didn’t.  Probably stupidly, we never went on a real fully-loaded bike tour before September 1.  And I’m really glad we didn’t, now.  Between the hills and Rachel getting heat stroke, that first day was REALLY hard and equally scary and I’m pretty sure if we’d tried to go on an overnight tour with all our stuff before our official launch, the initial difficulties of riding 50-60 miles with 100 lbs beneath us would have scared us out of attempting this adventure.  And I wouldn’t be sitting here now in Atlanta, Georgia proud of us for making it this far already.

I think I woke up every morning for about the first week or so asking myself, “Can we really do this?” and not being too sure of the answer.  I’m much more confident now, and Rachel is too.  Both of us have gown in wisdom, I think, already in our first month of bike touring.  As Rachel wrote earlier, we’ve learned that it’s better for us to slow down and not bike more than 50 miles a day.  40-45 miles is best.  Not only does this keep us in better moods with each other (which it’s extremely important to be on good terms with the person you’re bike touring with!), but it also allows us time in the afternoon/evening to read, write, cook dinner in daylight, and not go to bed utterly exhausted.  Also, we’re on this bike tour because we want to SEE the country– not rush through it!  When we’re not trying to bike 60 miles before the sun goes down, we have time to explore old cemeteries, visit national battlefield sites, eat farm fresh ice cream right from the farm, and meet the locals.

We’re also growing more confident with finding a place to stay the night.  Everyone we meet asks us if we’re staying in motels every night.  I don’t know if that’s because we don’t look tough enough to pitch a tent and use a camp stove, or if they just can’t fathom bike touring without motel stays.  So far, we’ve had amazing experiences CouchSurfing and staying with friends, but we’ve had equally great experiences camping in the backyard of a veterinarian’s office, behind a family practice doctor’s office, the backyard of a church, and behind a stranger’s house.  Sometimes I’d get a little creeped out (it didn’t help that I picked up a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for some delightful tour reading at a used bookstore in Chicago) and the sound of a raccoon rustling in the bushes was enough to give me goosebumps.  But it’s getting easier as we go on.  And a lot of times it’s quieter to stealth camp than to pay for a spot at a campground (unless you park your tent 1/4 of a mile from some very busy train tracks like we did outside of Madisonville, TN).

I’m excited.  About everything.  There’s so much to look forward to.  Even this afternoon, when we’re going to meet with some amazing folks from Atlanta’s bicycle activism community.  I’ve never been so happy to live in the present in my whole life.  New videos coming soon!