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Published: February 9th 2009
Well, we have a lot of news.
The final leg of our bike trip is complete - we can now boast we've ridden from Edmonton, AB to Vancouver Island, BC to Tijuana, Mexico to Florence, Arizona, to NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana.
We haven't had a chance to write a blog in a lo-ong time and a lot has happened since then. If I remember correctly, we last wrote a blog on our way to the last state park of our entire trip (Sam Houston Jones State Park) - and it was an awesome park. Very swampy and Louisiana-y, it came complete with mysterious and eerie trees with moss clinging to every branch, turtles sunning themselves on rocks, hiking trails, and miles and miles of swamp.
There's so much to say, I'm going to just mention everything in point form!
- I went for two runs in the state park (I saw someone else doing it and realized I was already wearing running shoes!) and realized that biking legs are NOT the same as running legs - I was sore for days!!
- We stayed in the most stereotypical red neck RV park in the history of all
Our farewell from Caliente
We had a going away party too - you can't beat that hospitality!time - think: confederate flags, camouflage wifebeaters, and a sign that boasted "we should have picked our own cotton." Riiiiight...
- We got rid of our recycling!!!!! We carried a jumbo sized garbage bag of it on the back of the bikes from Las Cruces, New Mexico to New Iberia, Louisiana and finally had to BREAK IN to a recycling centre to drop it off - there was razor wire fence around the whole thing but where there's a will, there's a way...
- We've had numerous people offer us money (leading us to think that we look even more homeless than before). We figure we've been offered about 200 dollars (we always politely decline). Two of the more noteworthy instances: a very nice man gave us a ride when there was, surprise, no shoulder and tried to give us $50 (that's AMERICAN) when he dropped us off. Second, a man whose employment involved holding a clearance sign (you know... 50% off on all lampshades at so-and-so store) on a street corner tried to give us $3 to "buy ourselves a soda." The big bag of recycling probably doesn't help - not only do we look homeless, as
we're saving garbage - but also a little clueless - as I don't think there's any money in recycling cereal boxes!
- The roads still sucked. Surprisingly though, we had very little trouble getting rides when we needed to - though we did have one man stop and offer us a beer, as he wasn't going far - "just going to check the cattle - getting soused and driving around, that's what us old guys do for fun"
- We were offered a place to stay in the "Immaculate Conception Catholic Church" in the rectory - we were relieved when we missed the church, as we didn't feel very comfortable with that idea...
- We cycled past lots of old plantations - complete with massive houses (with the big pillars on the front!) and saw sugar cane growing in the fields. At first we were very confused as to what all the long green shoots were on the side of the road ("Do they grow bamboo here?") - it was sugar cane!! Harvested sugar cane smells absolutely AWFUL - we think they burn the fields after harvesting and it's just disgusting!
Since the last blog we
got rides from:
-Tony and Molly, a young married couple no older than us, expecting a baby and on their way back from Walmart. Took us to the redneck RV park when there was no shoulder on a busy road. They were a lot of fun, though I think they thought we were crazy and extremely fit. "I don't like that exercize stuff" (in their deep south accents)
- John, a very nice man from Tennessee who I'm pretty sure never picked up a hitch-hiker in his life, but said he saw me smiling! (awww) Also, left us in his truck alone with the keys about ten minutes after picking us up! (and offered us $50) - drove us to Lafayette over a busy road with no shoulder.
- Donna and Joanna - threw Mike and the bikes in the back and me in the middle of the front seat of the truck to give us a lift over a bridge - on their way home from Walmart as well.
- Dave and Erik - two teachers from a college in Morgan City (taught Helicopter Aggresssion - surviving helicopter crashes) picked us up and took us
home for the night - set up the tent in the back yard - lots of fun!
- Donna - gave us a ride over a bridge with absolutely no shoulder and dropped us off on the other side of the Mississippi River!!
And then.... we were in NEW ORLEANS!!!! First though, we spent a night on the outskirts of town in the KOA (aka the Kamping Kult of K-America where everything is k-ompletely ridi-k-ulous. For example - you can plug your computer (sorry komputer) into the Komputer Konnection while you're Kamping. UGH. To top off this k-raziness, it cost $35 AMERIKAN for a patch of grass by the playground. We've avoided these places at all costs until the last night! How fitting. (Also shocking, is how the blatantly obvious acronyms are ignored... perhaps so many Kapital Ks are a bad idea in the deep south? Just saying....)
Also fitting, is that on our last night of camping on our bike trip, our tent broke.... One of the poles cracked at the pressure point. We wrapped almost an entire roll of electrical tape (found in the ditch) around it while at the KOA and managed to get
More appropriately, "Welcome to Hell"
No offense intended. I'm sure Texas is really nice. (if you hate recycling and love steak) our previously self-supporting tent to serve as a bit of a lean-to. We figure we've slept in our precious Sojourn2 for at least 200 nights (counting all the nights we had it set up on our balcony last summer!), and this third injury proved to be pretty severe. A part of a pole broke before, but it didn't affect the structure - and Mike burned a hole in the fly with our rocket stove.
Anyways - New Orleans was AWESOME. Absolutely everything was interesting - from the houses to the streets to the people watching. We met a fellow cyclist (also ending his trip in New Orleans from California) on the road on the way to our WarmShowers host's house and met up with him later that night. Our wonderful host, John, took us out our first night to Pat O'Brien's - famous for it's "Hurricane" drink special (oh-so politically correct), and we hit the town - went to see a jazzy band play. The live music scene in New Orleans seems phenomenal, with the 8-person band we saw belting out sultry tunes all night long. The brass was soulful, the guitar upbeat, the drumming intense, the keyboard electrifying,
The beginning of a really awful experience!
But fun in hindsight... To the left - a freeway. To the right, the Mexican border. and the singing powerful. Everyone in the bar ended up dancing, even Mike went from toe-tapping to full-on grooving to the music!
The downside to hitting the town to experience New Orleans awesomeness is that our poor biological clocks really don't understand it. We're used to bed at 7pm, so bed at 2am just throws us for a loop. Needless to say, we were exhausted the next day. We spent the rest of our days walking around the French Quarter, checking out a local artshow, riding the street car, and generally enjoying ourselves. John was an absolutely awesome host (Warmshowers never lets you down!), offering lots of insider advice on what to do and see in New Orleans, as well as taking us out and showing us around. He's planning a trip to Alaska in the spring, so we had lots to talk about. We went gang style bike riding with him and his friends one night - it's fun to feel as though cyclists own the roads! - until the motor John had installed on one of his bicycles broke (the gas tank sprung a leak) and we had to cut it short. Man over machine again!
Boxing up the Beasts
Can't help but admit we were pretty happy to see them in there by this point! One last thing to talk about in New Orleans... Bourbon Street. Maybe I'm just misinformed, but I pictured live jazz and blues bands, people sipping whiskey on outdoor patios with soulful singers belting out tunes by the piano, lots of authentic character and distinct New Orleans flavour at every turn... etc. On the contrary, Bourbon Street was all about the neon lights, "live sex acts" clubs, "barely legal" strippers, "big-ass beers" for $1, garbage trucks patrolling the streets, really drunk tourists of all varieties (where else do you see frat boys, elderly couples, awkwards tourists sporting Bourbon Street t-shirts, and total skeeze balls, all walking around drunk in the same place, tripping over their own feet and spilling their beers?), and general scum. The streets are pressure washed every night - to get rid of the plastic cups piling high in the gutters (alcohol in plastic cups is allowed to be taken on to the street all night long), the vomit on the sidewalks, the disgarded hot dogs, and the general filth that accumulates whenever you get thousands of humans together. Despite all this - it is a bit irresistable, albeit depressing, just to take a few walks up and
down for the people-watching. We even succumbed to the "big-ass beers", though I'm fairly sure they're more likely fifty percent water - it's the placebo effect!
Also taking away from my enjoyment of this tacky, fake seeming, tourist trap, is that absolutely NO beverage containers are recycled. Done with the beer bottle? Straight in the trash! Whaaaat?!?! Aluminum can? Garbage! Beer in an actual, reusable glass? Forget it! We couldn't handle it...
The real New Orleans character and charm seems to come alive, not on its world famous Bourbon Street, but in the areas surrounding it in the French Quarter.
Anyways, this is getting a bit long. We spent five nights in New Orleans and caught the Amtrak back to Maricopa, Arizona on February 2nd for out 48 hours train ride. We fell asleep in Texas that night, woke up in Texas the next morning, and fell asleep in Texas again that night. We finally awoke in Arizona at 3am and transfered all our stuff (including the boxed up bikes) to the train station, where we set up camp on the floor and caught a few more hours of much appreciated sleep.
We managed to cycle
Houston
Seemingly, a very neat city (though we didn't hang around much) about one mile from the train station when the shoulder disappeared - we pressed on until a girl in a pick-up truck pulled a u-turn in the middle of the highway and started shouting "this is the worst highway in the world" over and over, waving her cigarette in the air for effect. I don't think we could have said no, so we jumped in the back and she drove us 20ish miles to Casa Grande, past miles and miles of feedlots. From there, we began the somewhat difficult ride to Mike's Oma and Opa's - we had a headwind the whole way and it was HOT. Stopped at a fruit stand and devoured some naval oranges - two each - as the hot weather was causing us to run out of water faster than normal.
And that was it. The bike trip was over. A bit anti-climatic I suppose, but satisfying nonetheless. We came to the decision to end in New Orleans for various reasons: The main ones:
1) This was as far as we originally wanted to go anyway! (see our newspaper article - Edmonton to New Orleans was the plan) The fleeting notion that we
might go to Florida was really just filler, as we didn't actually want to cycle through the craziness that we've been told is the Florida coast.
2) To put it bluntly: The roads sucked (a road with a shoulder! But why?). The camping sucked (what camping?). Even the wind had it in for us.
3) Texas reeallly was not our thing.
You're probably wondering what we decided to do instead....
We decided we wanted a new kind of challenge, rather than spending the majority of our time looking for RV parks and hitchhiking over bridges, we want to get off the roads and into "the wild". Our legs can pedal all day no problem, our bums are used to sitting on vintage seats, and our bikes do all the work when it comes to carrying our gear. We miss camping! When my mum visited in December, she brought us our backpacks, as we were pondering doing a backpacking trip rather than cycling east after completing our Canada to Mexico ride. We've decided to put them to good use. We're going to go "rough it in paradise." We found the one place in the continent where the
weather is above freezing, campsites exist and are plentiful, hiking is rumoured to be phenomenal, and we can really experience the joys of getting off the beaten path... Hawaii.
We had a huge amount of trouble with the idea of flying somewhere, but swimming isn't an option. Mexico doesn't have the camping we're looking for. Freight liners don't take passengers from one American state to another. Florida is all about the RV parks (plus, does everybody realize that is was below freezing in Orlando a few days ago?!?! Wtf?).
Truth be told, we're pretty guilt-ridden about the flying part. We'll be very easy to take advantage of when we get back. If you ever wanted more trees planted in your backyard, you'd probably be able to convince us that a dozen premium rose bushes would be a viable way to help offset the carbon emissions from our flight. We're planning on "carbon offsetting" the official way, but for now we just hope it's worth it. It's a new trip. Exactly five months of bike trip are over, this is a new backpacking adventure that we've always wanted to do. We didn't think of it ourselves, a cyclist we
met on the California coast gave us the Hawaii idea, but we've always really wanted to some backcountry hiking. We have mixed feelings about ending the bike trip and flying to Hawaii, but we're trying our best to seperate the two. One thing is clear: this is not a "vacation" or a "reward" for cycling so far. We're planning on making this the "roughest" experience yet! No more canned beans, we'll be soaking dried beans and lentils in our back packs during the day, boiling all our own water (no more gas station bathroom refills), carrying all our gear on our backs (no more bikes to bear the burden of that weight!), and sleeping in backcoutry campsites that don't come complete with full hook-ups and cable TV (or so we hope!). Also, to answer a commonly asked question: no we are not rich, nor are we living off some sort of trust fund! Things just don't cost as much when you have a flexible schedule and are willing to forego fancy restaurants and hotels that fold your towels into animal shapes.
We'll be in Hawaii for 43 nights and then plan to return to Phoenix where we will still
hitch a ride with Mike's O-parents back to Canada.
Hawaii, here we come...!
PS - We can't seem to get the pictures from Mike's camera to work, so maybe another time! It's a pity - he has the bulk of the good ones!
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