Ride across America - Friday September, 19 2008 - Day 5

Friday September, 19 2008 - Day 5
Ok, Chet should get out of his bed right now and punch me in the back of the head. He is 60+ years old and every night he tries to sleep and I keep one light on and tap the keys. He tosses and turns and I tell him I am almost done but almost is relative and dreams don’t come easy to the exhausted. In addition, this morning at 4AM the alarm clock went off. He silenced it somehow only to have it blare again. Tonight, he said his throat was starting to hurt. I said that mine hurt yesterday but after sticking around for a day of training it decided to find a weaker host. I hope he gets some rest. We are all running on minimal sleep.
Joe and I start out pedaling after Chet and I agree go over the days riding route –trying for some sanity. At the first turn Joe and I find the road studded with rocks and immediately re-route. Chet and Bo are in the truck and there is no cell reception for miles. We play this cat and mouse game every day. We plan a route and then screw the support crew by changing the route as we ride for any number of reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all. This gives whoever is the support crew for that leg of the ride fits.
Every evening we plan our route for the following day. Every morning we review the route. Every night we have traveled a different route. Today it was a studded rock road and a girl in the back woods convenience store of West Virginia who couldn’t tell me what the name of a major road was less than 5 miles away but insisted we take 250 North instead of South. South we went and threw sanity out with the bath water.
We are out of PA!!! We went from PA to WV and found WV to have two specialties, tobacco and beer. From WV we crossed the Ohio river and it was a celebratory moment. I took picture of the “Welcome to Ohio” sign as I drove the truck across the bridge. Bo, Chet and Joe were pedaling far ahead of me at this point. Chet fixed Bo’s bike so that the brake doesn’t rub and he cranked for 40+ miles today. He would have gone further but blew a tire.
Shortly after Bo’s tire gives it’s dying breath/wheeze he calls Joe looking for Chet and I to come with the support truck. Joe tells him that he doesn’t have my cell number and Bo thinks he is just being tested. Joe hangs up the phone. Bo calls back and says “I am not kidding, I have a flat tire”. Joe hangs up immediately. This goes on several more times and Joe stops answering Bo’s calls. Bo continues walking is crippled bike down the road shaking his head.
Chet and I catch up with Bo and ask him why he let the air out of his rear tire. He is a bit upset at this point so we back off and load him and the bike into the truck. This is how the days go by. Meanwhile Joe is pedaling and taking down a telecommunications satellite with amount of Blackberry traffic he is generating. I know if I gaze out the window tonight I will see the satellite falling to earth, think it a shooting star and make a wish. This is also how the days go by.
The mighty Ohio River is lined with large belching facilities. Some discernable by their nuclear reactor cylinder shaped stacks. Others are refining something but we don’t stop to inquire. The tub boats push large barges of coal up and down the river. It is a magnificent site and frightening at the same time. Wall street jumps around with blips and dips. This land we are traveling through is made of solid steele things that haven’t moved in years and are not going to move anytime soon. It really balances my perspective on how myopic America is focused on how the financial markets are performing but the majority of people and businesses are pounding away faster than my heartbeat on the uphill.
We eat dinner at Applebee’s in Marietta OH. Joe has never been to an Applebee’s and we drive the staff a bit crazy with bring me a couple more of these requests as we find the food a favorable match to our hunger. From Marietta, we start another night ride on Rt. 50. If anyone ever tells you to ride your bike at night stop listening to them because they have flipped their bozo bit. Joe and I load up our lights, blinkers, water bottles and shorts with Chamois butter (fancy French term for crotch lubricant).
We start pedaling and the darkness overtakes us. Joe’s light is terrible at best but we don’t let that deter us from cruising down the shoulder of the road at 25 mph. We spot a deer off to the right and it bounds off into the woods– random boring fact. After running into and over several things we decide to ride side by side and join our lights in order to increase visibility. This works better but we start to realize that we are very visible but cannot see much debris on the road. We decide we need a much better system before doing any more night riding. Great but we still have 10 miles to go before we reach Athens OH. Two miles short of Athens on a particularly dark stretch Joe’s tire wheezes it’s death breath and we stop to change the tire.
I have an e-mail from Joe tonight with the following message – Tonights blog needs to touch on:
Trucks in penn.
Appleby's
The economy
Nuclear power plants
Wind
And the greatest weather ever.
If anyone would like me to expand upon these topics on a further blog or at another time let me know.
Here is a link to the kids and cause we are riding for - http://www.lisas810.com/cause_AOR.html