Photos from Recent Weeks

February 13th, 2012 Posted by Rachel Published under Riding. No Comments.

Since we’re hard at work on editing video and other things during our break, we’re going to simply give you some photos to enjoy instead of writing a long post this week! Most of these are from January in Louisiana and Texas.

Permission Slips

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”?

On the Edge of a Blade

January 30th, 2012 Posted by Rachel Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

Last week Wednesday, we arrived in Austin, TX after 9 days of straight riding from Gonzales, LA.  After a few days of relaxing and sleeping copious amounts at a friend’s in Houston, TX, we are finally starting to get feeling back in our brains and extremities.  While I don’t know that Jessica would agree with me on this next statement, I would say those 9 days were some of the worst on this trip, quite possibly harder than the Everglades even.

The night before we departed from Gonzales, we looked at the forecast and were a bit worried.  70% chance of thunderstorms were predicted.  When we’re riding with gigantic steel bits between our legs and get sopping wet in the rain, thunder and lightening is not really an ideal weather situation.  But we had made the decision to stay longer in New Orleans, which had eaten up our planned rest days already.  This meant that we had to leave, no choice.

When we left on this trip, Jessica and I had promised that we could live free of deadlines and go where the wind blew us and on our own schedule.  The problem with this notion is that it is nearly impossible to coordinate with other people and their lives in this manner.  Beginning tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan 31), we will be back in Wisconsin for a month.  We are due to be working a paid gig the first full week of February in Minnesota and since the weather is pretty much crap anywhere during winter, we are going to take the rest of the month off the bikes to catch up on work and sleep.  Therefore, we had coordinated with a colleague of my mother who lives in Austin to leave our bikes in his garage for the month.  He was leaving for a vacation of his own on the 26th, making our window of getting to his place nearly 500 miles away from Gonzales quite precise.  We had to go in bad weather or not, or face not being able to make it in time.  We also had to ride an average of 55 miles a day to arrive on time.  That’s an average of about 10 miles more a day than we’ve ridden the entire trip.

Turns out it really wouldn’t have mattered when we left though because the weather was crap the entire nine days.  As a native of the Midwest, which is not known for lovely winters, I can now say that moving to the south is not a solution for escaping crap winter weather.  It’s still cold.  Not as cold, but still cold.  It’s still wet and grey and yucky.  I’m actually excited to go back to the Midwest for a bit since it means at least there’s pretty snow to look at instead of barren trees and brown grass.

It took us about two and a half days to get to the Texas border.  Those two and a half days were pretty nuts.  Louisiana has the worst roads of any state we’ve ridden in so far.  They are filthy.  I got two flats and even changed out my rear tire due to eight very large nasty gashes that had been created by the stones, glass or anything else that lies on the pathetic shoulders of Louisiana.  I’m sure the landscape would be nice in summer with green instead of brown and rainy, but that’s the nature of our beast.  We wouldn’t want to be down here in the heat anyway.

Texas was pretty much more of the same.  The landscape changed slowly.  Becoming more vast and a little bit more arid as we neared Austin.  The shoulders widened to larger than a full lane (in most places, sometimes they disappeared) and were clean for the most part.  The American flags quadrupled in size.  We saw elephants and cows and impressively size ranches.  Rolling hills came along too, which we only really minded when the wind was blowing badly, which was more often than we would have liked.

At about day 5 or so, we were wiped out.  When looking at the map, we were barely north of Houston and it was soul depleting to see that.  How could we not be further along?  Our mileage deadline for the day of another 20 miles was just not tenable either.  We were just too tired.  A quick check on the GPS showed a car rental place in the town 20 miles down the road.  So we settled on driving ourselves out of the miserable weather, the exhaustion and the remaining 200 miles.  We found a spot in the woods to camp for the night and I tried to make a reservation.  It was a decision that once made, could not be undone, since waiting even one day longer in a location meant we would not reach Austin in time.  But it turns out that in Texas, the rental prices are much, much higher than in Florida and the one way rentals can only be made from airports.  Our choice was rent a car 50 miles south at the Houston airport or continue on route for the next 4 days.

At first, we made the reservation.  We went to sleep thinking we’d be in Austin within 24 hours and I even emailed the person we were meeting.  But when we woke up the next day, the winds had changed from a full on head wind to a side wind.  The few hours extra off the bike we’d saved ourselves by not riding that remaining 20 miles had refreshed our bodies just enough that we felt better physically too.  The weather was still yucky with on and off rain, but we changed our minds on the car and chose to keep riding.

In the end, I’m glad we did continue all the way on our bikes.  I have never been known to do well with little or poor sleep, feeling sick (which I started to half way through this leg), or extreme physical demands, so having no choice but to put up with it all and just get to the deadline is pretty cool.  We fought a lot, but it remained “kind” fights.  (By which I mean no vicious words were thrown out, nothing was said that was regretted, we understood it was the demands on us, not an actual anger towards each other.)  As I look back on the week and two days, I say it felt more miserable than our experience in the Everglades because I really do think it actually was more miserable.  But since we’d found a way to work through that tough stuff, these new challenges don’t seem as bad.  The edge has been dulled a little.  I’m able to see it with a greater perspective too.  The big picture is that while I might not actually enjoy the process while I’m going through it, I enjoy that I’ve gone through it in general.

Without diminishing both my own life experiences up to this trip and the life experiences of others, I do think I can now say that I have some street cred that I didn’t have before.  I thought I did.  I have had a pretty blessed life, but I’ve also put up with my fair share of bullying, embarrassments and huge mistakes that make me a pretty well rounded person if I do say so myself.  Maybe that sounds boastful, but after the agony that was the nine days from Gonzales to Austin, I think I’ve earned the right to boast a bit.  And Jessica has too.

The Quirky Life

January 24th, 2012 Posted by Rachel Published under Riding. No Comments.

One of the ways we keep ourselves entertained while riding our bikes thousands of miles is noticing the quirky little events and things along the way.  I thought we’d share a few of them with you today!

• Starting near Orlando, FL, heading south, we followed a Hansel & Gretel like path of green beans leading literally hundreds of miles south to Homestead, FL.
• The soil across the country has changed from brown in the Midwest, red in Georgia, white along the beaches in Florida and black as tar in the interior of Florida.
• We’ve watched the crops change too!  Miles of corn in Indiana, soybeans and green beans and then cotton in Georgia, then free-range cattle and sugar cane in Florida.  Louisiana and Texas have rice apparently.  Who knew!
• Indiana is rife with wooly worms.  EVERYWHERE.  We probably accidentally rolled over thousands.
• Louisiana has a Hansel & Gretel trail of Mardi Gras beads.
• The smell of skunk spray is 1000000000000000 times more appealing than road kill or factory farms.  We’ve actually even stopped downwind of it without even realizing because it’s that much more appealing.
• There are a massive amount of frogs and snakes as road kill.  It’s also very sad how many dogs, cats and hawks we’ve seen.
• The best way to stop a chasing dog quite literally in its tracks is to yell and wag your finger, “Go HOME!!”
• We have become the ultimate “old people” because we go to bed with the sun!  Sometimes that’s 6pm since it’s winter.
• Sometimes cars sound like Empire fighters coming up behind you depending on the type of road.  Then you can pretend you are a Rebel x-wing fighter.
• The most random and annoying songs play on repeat in our heads for hours.  Examples include: FreeCreditReport.com song, that heartbeat song from Rent, the Dirty Jobs and Pawn Stars theme songs, and Moves Like Jagger aka most annoying song EVER.
• Pancake mix can also be used to make calzones, pizza, garlic bread, pot pie and dumplins.
• Jessica is no longer a vegetarian after 6 years of resisting.
• Rachel is fascinated by Jessica’s new, insatiable desire for barbeque and chicken wings.  So many chicken wings.
• Rachel is now in love with barbeque too.  New fave food.
• On a long day, we can eat an entire pack of Keebler cookies.  Or any pack of cookies for that matter.
• Camping under a bridge is a pretty safe and good, albeit smelly (from bat guano) and a little nerve-wracking.
• People we meet at gas stations, on ferries, in restaurants, on the street, when buying jeans, etc treat us like the craziest celebrities they’ve ever met.
• Cows and horses almost always stop whatever they’re doing and stare at us as we ride past.  In Florida, a few cows even did a double-take and then backed up quickly because two women on bikes with kitty litter buckets as panniers is THAT SHOCKING.
• Sometimes horses (and once a whole herd of cows) run along with us.  It is seriously the coolest, most beautiful moment when it happens.
• Indiana is set up as a huge grid.  Really.  Each square mile is divided up by a road on each side.  Sometimes they are only gravel, which made for nasty riding, but mostly, they were like big bike paths.
• Georgia wins the prize for the least amount of shoulders on the road.
• Florida wins the prize for most amounts of shoulders.
• Texas wins the prize for the widest shoulders (so far).
• Louisiana wins the prize for WORST ROADS EVER.

The Big Easy

January 16th, 2012 Posted by Rachel Published under Mini-Adventure, National Parks, Personal Stories. No Comments.

New Orleans, Louisiana has a reputation. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard something about the city. Since I was a small child, I heard about the amazing music, the wild nightlife, the debauchery during Mardi Gras (and the rest of the year too). Like most people, I’d heard how New Orleans was a city like no other, one definitely worth saving the citizens said in the aftermath of notorious Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But I wasn’t sure I was a believer in all that.

In 2001, my family and I came down to New Orleans (NOLA as the locals lovingly call it) to look at University of New Orleans. Being 17 and excited at the prospect of going to school in a city with such a fun reputation meant I was looking forward to our trip. All I really remember is a gigantic, thong clad bottom on Bourbon Street, the smell of trash, driving through poor neighborhoods and being only slightly impressed with the university. And then again on my second trip this past June for my cousin’s wedding, I felt like I was going to get hepatitis C simply walking down Bourbon. I wasn’t all that impressed.

Jessica and I still wanted to come down to the Big Easy on this trip though. I mean, you don’t go to Gonzales (about an hour driving north) and don’t make the trip down. We were a bit worried about our safety, worried that it wouldn’t live up to it’s reputation yet again. But we hopped on the LA Swift bus last Tuesday anyway. Side note: We took the bus down because it was only $5 and we’re completely over riding our bikes into cities. It whisked us away and within an hour, Jessica’s high school classmate, Hillary, was picking us up to take us to the apartment she shares with her husband, Zack, in Uptown.

During the 5 mile drive from the tip of the French Quarter to their apartment, Hillary gave us a quick rundown of the area. Turns out that the St. Charles Street has a streetcar line and as a result is a vibrant, albeit pretty rich, community along it. She pointed out Loyola and Tulane and a gigantic park called Audubon Park, home to the NOLA Zoo and a 2.5 mile running and bicycle path that is very well used. Hillary also took us back to the French Quarter on her way to a meeting so we could have dinner that night. Thanks to her, we had an amazing meal. Check out Coop’s Place on Decatur if you are ever in NOLA. Jessica highly recommends the Creole Pasta. It’s her fave of the ENTIRE trip so far.

Over the past week, we’ve discovered that NOLA is exactly, exactly like the reputation. Its citizens are unbelievably sweet and so grateful for your business. The owner of the restaurant Fat Hen in Uptown gave us cookies and lots of extra dressing for our food just because we were new patrons. An antique store owner told us we absolutely had to go to Frenchmen Street, and then every single other person told us the same thing. Apparently, it’s THE place for good food, good music and more locals than tourists.

What really made the trip special though, was the warm reception from the women we ended up interviewing. On our first night in town, we walked past an Urban Outfitters where I hesitated because I had become obsessed with getting back into jeans, which are my favorite item of clothing. Jessica said, “Just try a pair on to feel it again.” To which I replied, “I’ll never take them off again.” When I didn’t like the first pair, I sent Jessica to find a second one, and the fitting room attendant stepped in to help. Jessica said, “Sorry she’s being so picky, she hasn’t worn jeans for 5 months.” The conversation was started then and we asked if she would be willing to talk to us on camera. Aba, that was her name, is amazing and so strong. We can’t wait to share her story with you all.

Then on Thursday, the evening before we were supposed to leave, we met up with 4 women whom I’d emailed from the National Organization for Women Meetup, hoping they might know someone we could interview. The conversation was easy and fun. They explained that NOLA is very, very liberal and a great place to live. They also convinced us to stay an extra three days so that we could interview them later. It was easy to say yes! And so worth it as well. It also allowed us to see a few more sights we’d been meaning to get to but time hadn’t allowed. There’s a fantastic World War II museum, and the National Historical Parks are informative and great. They talk about what life in LA is like, its history and the Jazz park has free performances, so we caught some great jazz too.

As much as I have loved every single place we’ve stopped, loved the people we’ve met and stayed with, the food we’ve eaten and the cities we’ve gotten to know, I haven’t been actually tempted to actually move to a place yet. I’m not sold since I absolutely melt in temperatures over 85, but NOLA is now my second favorite city on the planet after Berlin. I’m even a little sad I didn’t go to school down here afterall. It is alive like no other city. It should be at the top of everyone’s list for places to visit. Just make sure you ask Jessica and I to hook you into the local crowd. Locals love to show off their city and will make sure you don’t just get the Bourbon experience. We’ll be back for Mardi Gras and for Southern Decadence (their “pride” weekend) and just for fun.

Tearin’ Through the Deep South!

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!

Roam Your Soul – Expanding Women’s Empowerment

January 2nd, 2012 Posted by Rachel Published under Website Profiles. 2 Comments.

It’s been great to expand our readership over the past few months of riding.  We always expected this to happen, but it’s been a vital part of how we keep energized about the project.  One of the best relationships we’ve formed along these lines is with Christine Perigen.  She’s founded Roam Your Soul, an Online Adventure Workshop for Women.

It’s a place for women who “want to explore their daily lives with new eyes, experience adventure and roam their inner soul of who they are.  The workshop will help [women] on an internal adventure that results in soul growth and learning about [oneself] through daily explorations, weekly reflections, and the relationships [they] build.”

We want to share this great project with you all because we’re working with Christine to form a challenge for Week 3 based on Against The Grind.  Since we have similar goals – to inspire women to take more risks and push themselves to face challenges head on – this was a great match up for us.  And we think it’s a great match up for you too!  (I know we have a lot of male readers, and sorry that you can’t join, but you probably have women in your lives who might be interested in the Roam Your Soul workshop.)

Sign up here– $20 for the 4-week workshop:

if you’d like to use a New Year’s Resolution to be a bit better at facing challenges in 2012!  (You’ll get to see some videos we haven’t released yet too!) While we’re working with Christine in Week 3 in January, the registration for January is closed, but your chance to participate in February is still here! The workshop will run from Feb 17 – March 18 and we’ll be Week 3 again!

Overall, we mostly just like sharing stories, in any form, of women doing great things to break down the barriers and challenges we face each day!

A Discovery of Nice Sized Purportions

December 19th, 2011 Posted by Rachel Published under Personal Stories, Riding. 2 Comments.

When we started this trip, we were either making friends or visiting friends on a very fast schedule.  Within the first week, we had visited my alma mater and some friends in Milwaukee, and within the first month, we had visited family friends, met really cool strangers who are now friends and it all kept our spirits high.  When we hit Georgia, Jessica said, “This now is the first part of the trip where neither of us have really been.  It’s the first time it really feels like a bike trip.”  I agreed.  But then we had such a warm welcome in Atlanta and Savannah and then stayed with great friends of Jessica in St. Simons that it still felt great and new and fun.

And then, after we departed Orlando, as you know, it went a bit downhill.  It’s interesting as each day dawns anew after we’ve gotten out of South Florida, the tone of the trip is so different now.  I tried to edit a video that I had started back in Georgia and it just felt so cheesy and naive.  Last Friday, we went to a Shabbat dinner with our Couchsurfing host and explaining our trip to people has clearly shifted.  It’s a more mellow and humble description.  We have both ups and downs to share now as well.

But as we ride through northwestern Florida, headed to Gulf Shores, I’m going to remind myself everyday of a moment that happened on the day we were riding into Tallahassee last week.  As we sat, eating lunch, we saw from across the way, two bike tourists pull into a gas station.  We immediately jumped up and ran over there to talk to them.   It was a bit silly and I even laughed at it then.  We were so excited to see them and it showed.  We couldn’t pack our lunch away fast enough.

It turned out to be just what I needed to remind me of the ups on the trip.  They laughed at our jokes about riding, shared gear tips, got excited about our route because they had just come from there (across the Southern Tier through the Southwest), and knew the kind of exhaustion only a bike tourist can feel.  It was fantastic.  By the way, they are Khara and Emir of The UnTour and you should definitely check them out!

So I realized as the high from meeting and chatting with them kept me going over all the hills leading into Tallahassee (they aren’t huge, but it was the first hills we’ve had since mid-October!), that we had simply gone far, far too long without seeing friendly faces.  Now, it’s not as though we didn’t meet wonderful and friendly people in South Florida, we really did and their smiles helped a lot.  But sometimes the face needs to understand just exactly what you’re going through.  We need to find ways to meet up with far more people who can give us this vital nutrient on the road going forward.  It’s clearly not enough to know we’ll see family members in a month, a few weeks, a few days (as we are in Gulf Shores), not enough to know we’re doing great things.  We have to see that twinkle in other people’s eyes.

So as I have before, and I will again, I realize that the most important thing in my life is all of you.  Our friends and family.  Thank you for recharging our batteries when we couldn’t do it ourselves.  Thank you for opening up your homes and hearts when we ride into your town.  Thank you for staying where you are so that we can roam ourselves.  It’s not a new discovery, but sometimes I have to remember it.

I bet you’ll think we’re crazy!

December 12th, 2011 Posted by Rachel Published under Personal Stories. No Comments.

I have to confess that I have a bit of writer’s block today.  The thing is that since Jessica last wrote, we haven’t done all that much.  At least not anything that is really worth sharing.  We stayed in Clearwater for about 5 days with Wendy, our Couchsurfer host from Day 1 (she moved from Johnson Creek!), and her roommates.  They were super sweet and it was wonderful to catch up and see how life has changed for ourselves and for Wendy in three months, but we mostly just used the time to relax.  Her roommate, Aaron took us to a bar to watch the Green Bay Packer game (what a nail-biter!), we edited video and photos, slept and read.

We then moved on to Spring Hill, where we stayed for two days with Marilyn and Phil, friends of my parents who snowbird each year.  Again, we slept, read, caught up on some TV, and edited video.  It was very relaxing and lovely and just what we needed.  But I have to say, doesn’t seem to make for riveting blogging.

One thing that I do have to mention is two bike shops we had to patronize in the last week or so.  City Cycles & Supply Co. in Clearwater helped me figure out that a bit of plastic was rubbing against my rear tire with such wonderfully friendly banter.  I would absolutely recommend taking your bike there if you need work and happen to be in Clearwater, or are looking for a bike or something.  Then in Spring Hill, I had a massively squeaky brake that needed attending to.  Again, we found a gem in Z and his shop, Extreme Bicycles.  I would absolutely recommend going there if you are near Spring Hill for your biking needs.  Thank you to both!!

Since that’s about it, I think I’ll just wow you with a gallery of the photos I worked on over the week.  They are all from the Everglades, and are the reason for the post’s title.  You’ll wonder why we thought it was so miserable down there.  If I saw my photos, I would.  Enjoy!

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

December 5th, 2011 Posted by Jessica Published under Riding. 6 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!