Blog 4/15/10--Another Day, Another State

from the lobby of the Best Western Motel in Wiggins, MS.

 

Another beautiful day here.  50 this morning, 80 this afternoon, a stray cloud once in a while, and of course, a SE wind that started out light in the morning and became pretty strong by lunchtime--gusting between 15 and 25 or 30 mph all afternoon.  Still, with all the blue sky and mild temperatures, should I complain?  My shoes have barely gotten once wet the whole trip!  Of course I shouldn't whine about the wind, but I do anyway.  We've done the only thing we can--moved up our starting time in the mornings to as soon as it's light enough to be seen in order to get in as many miles as possible before the wind comes up.

 

As we rode back thru Franklinton, LA  from our motel this morning to get back on the route, we noticed something we apparently missed yesterday since the wind was blowing pretty hard when we got there--a really, really bad odor, which our noses connected with fertilizer--or fecal matter, one or the other.  We deduced it was coming from a large factory just north of downtown since it permeated the entire area.  The factory said Cargil on it, so I now have another reason to dislike huge factory-farm enterprises.

 

But the odor did hasten our exit from an otherwise nice, friendly town, and our route once again eschewed the larger, more direct highways in order to send us down barely used country roads--most of which had great pavement despite their very rural nature.  I suspect some of them exist only to aid in the loggers' decimation of the forests, pine trees apparently being the only thing the very sandy soil in southern Louisiana and Mississippi will support.

 

After 25 miles, we came to Bogalusa.  I expected a pretty, old southern town with a bunch of ante-bellum mansions.  Maybe they are there somewhere, but we didn't see them.  Instead we saw an enormous factory which I decided was a paper-pulp manufacturing facility.  It didn't smell all that good either, and I'm afraid that lingering odor followed our noses right to the state line just east of town.

 

Mississippi road commissions seem not to believe in road shoulders, which makes us glad our route again got us off the main highways as much as possible and on to deserted side roads.  I suspect that in all today we did an extra 25 miles zigging and zagging one way or another to stay off main highways as much as possible. 

 

We ended up in Wiggins, MS, a town of around 10,000 right on US 49.  It's actually north of our route about 5 miles, and in order to get here, we rode the five miles on US 49, which is practically a freeway but is graced with shoulders.  We'll be headed back south on it at daybreak tomorow morning with a goal of making it to the Gulf of Mexico at Dauphin Island, tho we may cut it short at Bayou Le Batre.  We ought to be taking a ferry across Mobile Bay and biking through Pennsacola FL Saturday.

 

So far, Mississippi is running very close to Louisiana in the dogs-giving-chase department, and one of our commenters asks our techniques for dealing with them.  In general, the best approach is to ride as silently as possible whenever canine critters might be around in order to be as far down the road as possible when they realize the game's afoot.  If we have a good enough head start, lots of them give up right away or only chase half-heartedly, or at worst, we tire them out before they catch up to us.  After that, we rely on a big, loud, bass voice--mine!!  The louder and lower the voice, the better.  I also do my best to be closer to the dogs than Kathy since I'm bigger and louder and hopefully more scary.  It's all worked so far, and a good thing too, since the next plan is rapid and fervent prayer!  Happily, we've had no problems in the much dreaded dog-chasing-and-it's-steeply-uphill category.  Presumably those dogs have already become fat and lazy munching on other bicylists!  Kathy thinks we ought to use the dogs as sprint-interval workouts, and I'm not surprised since she always beats me in those anyway, she doesn't have to be faster than the dog--just faster than me!!  Besides, I find it's hard to sprint and yell really loud and pray simultaneously.

 

A final few words today about our legs.  The first couple of weeks they felt pretty bad--such a huge increase in mileage, all that climbing, etc. But whether they've adapted of we've gotten used to it, or the pain generators are all worn out, the legs don't hurt so much anymore (the end of the mountains and Texas Hill Country may have something to do with it too).  But what we do find is that any time we try to accelerate very hard--from a dog or a stop light with cars behind us, for example, we get an immediate burning--what cyclists everywhere refer to as the lactic-acid burn.  It aches like crazy for a couple of seconds but then goes away.   Other than that, our legs feel okay in the morning and get pretty darn tired somewhere around 50 or 60 miles every day.  I guess maybe we shouldn't be too surprised about that.

 

Doug