Vickie's Ramblings: Ten Pleasant Miles

Today's mileage: 62
Cumulative elevation gain: 600 feet
Weather: Sunny, 80, perfect
Attitude: discouraged

Ten pleasant miles, and 52 pretty awful ones. Would've been even more of the awful except that I rode in the van for the first 20 miles.Very rough roads, no shoulder at all, semis, dump trucks, logging trucks, lots and lots of traffic. Some of the roads were so rough I am surprised no one took a spill. And even though these were "back roads", there is so much truck traffic that it's just insane. Surely it can't get any worse??

And just to add to the joy, I took a wrong turn and got to ride a few bonus miles on a busy 4-lane highway with, you guessed it, no shoulders. On these awful roads I have taken to just riding in the middle of the lane and watching fearfully in the rearview mirror. Otherwise the vehicles just don't pull over at all.

The highlight of the day for me, on that one pleasant 10 mile stretch, was coming across the old Cypress Methodist Campground. This place was started way back in the late 1700's. Not sure if any of the buildings (which the camp-meetingers call "tents") are original, but it is on the national register of historic places, and is still in use for a week or two each October. Brings back fond memories of going to camp meeting with my grandma when I was a kid.

Camp meeting, for those of you who don't know, is an annual event for some churches. Neil Diamond's "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show" sums it up pretty well. As I recall we had church services morning, afternoon, and evening, with the evening sermon always ending with a rendition of "Just As I Am" and people going to the altar to get saved. (Which I did once when I was 14. It didn't stick. Sorry Grandma.) I spent quite a bit of the sermon time watching the mice run across the rafters in back of the preacher, and the time in between eating fudgesicles.

Interesting road names of the day:
Skull Swamp Rd. (not going down there)
Round O Rd. (as opposed to.....?)
Pud Huddle Dr. (12 year old boy giggles again)

We have now lost three people from our group. One went home with tendinitis; one because her father died; and one of our sags, who took the spill last week, had to leave per doctor's orders. Headquarters is flying us in a new sag driver in a couple of days.

Many times today on those awful roads I asked myself why in the world am I doing this. I'm tired of the traffic, tired of the monotony of rural Georgia and S. Carolina.... I like woods, I like rural, but there's been so little to see, other than trees and trucks, since we rode inland from the coast. And I'm disappointed not to have seen Savannah or Charleston, which I thought would surely be highlights on this trip.

Yesterday was our 3rd rest day, really and truly a rest day because there was nothing at all to do there. I spent most of the day reading a book.

Tomorrow night we are back to the coast, and our next rest day is on the beach. That's all that's keeping me going for now.