December 30, 2010

December 30, 2010

“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride”. – John F. Kennedy

Today was a leisurely day in Port Gibson. We did a 33-mile loop, partly on the Trace and partly in the Mississippi countryside.

The main point of interest was Windsor Ruins. The remaining 23 magnificent Corinthian columns are all that is left of what was once the grandest home in Mississippi. It was built in the 1850s, survived the Civil War, but burned in an accidental fire in 1890. 

The countryside around Windsor Ruins is very dramatic, with deep gullies and ravines and everything covered in kudzu. Miranda spotted a dead deer with its eyes picked out by crows.

Back in Port Gibson, we ate Chinese food and rode around looking at the historic buildings on Church Street. Miranda took a picture of the most famous building in town, a Presbyterian church whose steeple is topped by a finger pointing to the sky.

MB liked seeing the commemorative plaque for the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, a troupe of early twentieth century African-American singers headquartered at Port Gibson, whose members once included Ma Rainey.

While we did not ride every mile on the Natchez Trace Parkway, in five-and-a-half days we did ride a total of 455 miles, which is longer than the entire 440-mile distance of the Parkway. Now we’re taking a limousine (driven by Joey Richardson who runs our B&B) to Jackson Airport where we’ll pick up a minivan to drive our triplet bike back to Nashville. (Dad thinks that the limo ride is Miranda’s favorite part of the journey.) At Nashville we will collect our car, see a few friends, and take in the New Years Eve show at the Grand Ole Opry.

From this trip, we’ve learned the following things:

1.     How to pack light and live simply.

2.     How to find resourceful ways to stay warm in cold weather.

3.     How to find nutritious food in rural areas.

4.     How to keep our spirits up in the face of bad weather, strong winds, long distances, and steep hills

5.     That we really, really like home-cooked biscuits.

We want to thank everyone who supported our ride by donating money and cheering us on. Thanks too to Randy at Natchez Trace Travel for helping us before and during the journey, the staff of Bikes Not Bombs for sending us t-shirts, and everyone at all the B&Bs we stayed in for giving us such a warm welcome. Happy New Year to us all!

Our reflections at Cypress Swamp

Our sign that Lukas made for the trailer

A beaver bit this tree

Miranda and dad under a waterfall

A baby horse at Willowbrook Farm

December 29, 2010

December 29, 2010

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart”. – Iris Murdoch

We started at Willowbrook Farm outside of Canton MS and we ended up in Tuscan Columns B&B in Port Gibson MS. Altogether we rode about 85 miles – a new record for MB and Miranda. (And it’s also the longest Daddy has ever ridden in one day on the triplet.)

Took the longer route back to the Trace to avoid the rough road and bothersome dog we’d encountered on the night before. Rode along Ross Barnett Reservoir and saw many blue herons, egrets, hawks and turkey vultures. As we neared Jackson MS we took a detour onto a cycle path to avoid the heavy commuter traffic. While we were on the path, we went to a Natchez Trace information center where we learned more about the Trace and bought hats.  

Many of today’s stops were about Indians. We saw mounds where they buried their dead and their belongings. We also learned that in some tribes, if a high-ranking person died, his slaves would be killed along with him. The most impressive mound we saw was Magnum Mound near Port Gibson.

Somewhere around the site of the Battle of Raymond, we had our first sighting of Spanish moss. It is grey and from a distance (it hangs from trees along the Trace) it looks like cobwebs or witches’ hair.  

We had lunch (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) at the city of Clinton visitors center, where we sat out front in rocking chairs. (It was finally warm enough for eating outside, and for all of us to begin shedding layers of cycling clothes.)

Lots of animals today: Miranda spotted another armadillo; we saw five deer (only two of them dead); MB saw something she thinks was a muskrat; and near the Ross Barnett Reservoir we watched the flight of a beautiful black hawk with a grey mask.

We made a quick detour driving past the site of the ghost town of Rocky Springs. We also saw Owens Creek waterfall – once a torrent, now a trickle.

By now, having passed the state capitol of Jackson, we were in the Mississippi Delta and saw lots of swamps on either side of us as we rode.

Right before Port Gibson, as the sun was setting, we reached the Sunken Trace, where the Old Trace (the original frontier) road has sunken 10-12 feet into the ground. We may return tomorrow to take pictures.

Now we’re staying at Tuscan Columns, a B&B in an antebellum manor house. We’ve had pizza and chicken wings for dinner and are feeling very satisfied to have completed today’s long journey.

December 28, 2010

December 28, 2010

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best”. – Ernest Hemingway

We woke up this morning at French Camp (where we had a big breakfast including homemade biscuits and sorghum molasses that was made at French Camp in the autumn).

The highlights today were five short hikes.

1.     Cole Creek, a Tupelo cypress swamp that is evolving to a hardwood grove.

2.     Hurricane Creek, an area that identifies different plants in different elevations and soil conditions.

3.     Myrick Creek. Beavers moved out, no forwarding address.

4.     Red Dog Road, where we learned about the pine forest, including the fact that fires are good for rejuvenating the forest.

5.     Cypress Swamp, a beautiful place that has loads of cypress trees and the occasional alligator. We took a picture of the reflection in the water.

Suddenly, Miranda screamed “Armadillo!” (She saw two in the space of three minutes.) Other animals seen today: a pair of white-tail fawns bounding across the Parkway; an adult deer racing over the road; a red-tail hawk; white egrets on the Pearl River; two woodpeckers (heard, not seen – another visitor identified the call as that of a pileated woodpecker).

Other wonderful moments include: an elaborate story, invented by Miranda, starring characters from the Trace (Jeff Busby, Louis LeFleur, Ethyl Kosciusko, Hernando de Soto, and Elvis); lunch at the Station Café in Thomaston, MS, where MB enjoyed the sweet ice tea and where the waitress had just had two teeth pulled.

All in all, we rode 70+ miles, the longest MB or Miranda have ever ridden in a single day. This included three miles on the Old Trace to get to our B&B. Tonight we’re staying at a horse farm near Canton MS. The horses are right under us, and Miranda got to feed them apples.

December 27, 2010

27 December 2010

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live”. – Mark Twain

Today we started out at Bridges-Hall Manor in Houston, MS (NOT Houston, TX). Our B&B hostess was Carol, who is also a caterer. She’d served us a delicious dinner the night before and the breakfast was just as divine. (We are getting seriously addicted to homemade biscuits and fig jam.)

Almost immediately after leaving the B&B, Miranda spotted a small hawk on a wire. (She has eagle eyes.) We saw more hawks during the day, more turkey buzzards, and a dead possum. Overall it was a quiet day: fewer historic sites than on previous days, a lot of long stretches riding, a lot of storytelling. We really soaked up the sunshine – a crisp, clear day, very cold but with not a cloud in sight.

Here are some highpoints:

1. We stopped at the Old Trace and got our picture taken by some fellow visitors.

2. We had a typical Southern roadside lunch of “meat and three”:  choice of meatloaf, BBQ pork, or fried steak, plus three veggies (creamed corn, green beans, fried squash, mashed potato). The restaurant was filled with men in camo, who Miranda and MB initially thought were soldiers but learned from Stuart that they were deer hunters.

3. Took a walk to an overlook at Jeff Busby Park (Thomas Jefferson Busby was the congressman who, during the 1930s, introduced the bill to restore the Trace as a National Park).

4. We arrived at French Camp, which was once a trading post in the frontier days but since 1885 has been a school. They have recreations of historic buildings and also a bed and breakfast, where we’re sleeping tonight.

We’re doing great and are at milepost 180. We hope we can blog tomorrow but if we can’t, sorry fans!

Miranda with trailer

Miranda at the AL-TN state line

26 December 2010

26 December 2010

“The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created. Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets 3000 miles to the gallon”. – Bill Strickland

We woke up this morning at Sachem B&B in Baldwyn, MS, and ended the day 52 miles south at Bridges-Hall Manor in Houston, MS. We had intermittent snow and sleet, but luckily we had learned how to keep warm by covering our feet with plastic bags (which help keep the wind out).

Some of our favorite things from the day:

1.     The flock of wild turkeys by the side of the road as we headed out of Baldwyn, back onto the Trace near milepost 276.

2.     The gravesites of 13 unknown Confederate soldiers. There are new headstones because the earlier markers were stolen – Miranda thinks they were taken because 13 is an unlucky number

3.     The Natchez Trace Visitors Center just outside Tupelo. We watched a short film about the history of the Trace and learned about the Kaintucks (the people who came down the Mississippi River on flatboats to sell goods and then had to walk home on the Trace). At the Center we also learned that in the region there were three main Indian tribes, called Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.

4.     In Tupelo we saw Elvis Presley’s birthplace and the church that he went to when he was young. (The church was moved near Elvis’s house in 2008.)

5.     Bynum Mounds just north of Houston, where we saw two Indian mounds where Indians (Marybeth thinks Chickasaws) buried people and their belongings.

The weather is a lot colder than we expected but we keep on going, thanks to all the people who are cheering us on and who donated money for this ride. (There’s still time to donate, by the way!)

Granny trying to take a picture

25 December 2010

25 December:

“It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century” – Author unknown

Merry Christmas! We woke this morning at 7:45 and Miranda showed us a new card trick and after a few games of rummy and a breakfast of oatmeal we packed up the bike and were off.

It was a very cold morning when we set out and within a few hours it was snowing. Our first stop was McGlamery Stand where we saw a huge fire tower and a cemetery with lots and lots of flowers.

Next stop the Tennessee- Alabama State Line where we took of couple of pictures of Miranda standing in Tennessee while Stuart was standing in Alabama. Also our mascot hedgie, a stuffed hedgehog, was in Tennessee with Miranda at the time.

Another one of our fun stops was Rock Spring. At Rock Spring we saw lots of beaver dams and the beaver’s house. We took a little hike around the place and ate snacks on the way.

After that we crossed the Tennessee River on this huge bridge, the John Coffee Memorial Bridge which spans Pickwick Lake. It was exciting to see the seagulls around us. The river was very wide because it was dammed up in the 1930s. On the far side of the River in the cliff face we saw a large cave that Indians once lived in.

By now it had started snowing. The snow had settled on the trees and the hills and the sides of the road. It was beautiful. Even though we were in the South, we were having a white Christmas!

Our next stop was Bear Creek Mound, just over the Mississippi State Line. This was an Indian burial mound that looked like a huge hill. Indians had lived there since 8000 BC and the mound was built around 1300 AD.  It was especially beautiful because of the snow covering it. We also had a snowball throwing contest into a garbage can.

As we cycled further south, we stopped at Cave Spring, a couple of large caves where Indians once lived or animals once slept. We continued on to milepost 298, where we were met by Tom Stott, our host at Sachem B&B in Baldwyn, MS. He picked us up in a car with a trailer so the three-person bike could fit. We had Christmas dinner with Tom and Jeanne which was delicious and their hospitality was greatly appreciated. As they say in the South, we were much obliged!

We rode our bike 56 miles through three states in one day. And we learned a lot about how to keep warm on a cold day on a bike.

Miranda hiking to Jackson Falls TN

24 December 2010

24 December:

“Life is like riding a bicycle. In order to keep your balance, you must keep moving”. – Albert Einstein

Today we cycled 62 miles from Santa Fe TN (Creeksview Farm B&B) to Collinwood TN (Miss Monetta’s Country Cottage)

highpoints: seeing the armadillo on the side of the road

seeing a red-tailed hawk being mobbed by smaller birds

saw lots of waterfalls – Jackson Falls and Fall Hollow where Stuart and Miranda stood under the waterfall and did not get wet.

We saw tobacco drying in a barn and we saw the spot where Meriweather Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame died of two gunshot wounds, one to the chest and one to the head, on October 11 1809. No one knows whether it was murder or suicide.

The last 15 miles of the journey were made after dark as the weather threatened snow. We kept ourselves warm by singing Christmas carols and the entire score of Mary Poppins.

Dinner was pizza and hamburgers and corn dogs and potato wedges in an Exxon diner and it tasted scrumptious.

What we learned:

1.     make sure your shoelaces are tucked into your shoes so they don’t get caught in the chain rings (unfortunately this happened to Miranda twice, the first time within two minutes of the start of the trip).

2.     Pacing. We learned that especially on the first day (when we had a lot of miles ahead) we needed to keep an eye on the time that we spent on our initial sightseeing stops.

3.     Delete all the photographs on your camera BEFORE the start of the trip.

4.     You can make an improvised banana split with a single banana and a small tube of vanilla goo.

22/23 December 2010

22 December: “Think of bicycles as ridable art that can just about save the world”. – Grant Peterson

We are on the road, first to Chicago and then to Nashville, packed with gear for, as far as possible, a self-sustained journey: two changes of bike gear; one set of street clothes; some power bars; tools; one lipstick. We’ll be doing so-called “credit card touring’, where we’ll be staying at bed and breakfasts along or near the Trace, rather than camping in the wintery weather (we may be radical but we’re not crazy). We’ll be buying food along the way and breakfasting at the B&B, but otherwise we’ll be depending on the supplies in the trailer to fill all our needs, from sunscreen to rain gear to bike locks to books.

For the morbidly curious, the bike is a customized three-person tandem, often called a “triplet”. Specs: eleven feet long (fourteen feet with trailer); aluminum construction frame; 27-speed; Meridian brand; 65 pounds unloaded, 410 pounds with riders, 510 pounds with trailer and gear. Top speed attained is 56 mph (downhill). It attracts stares wherever we go (though it didn’t impress the cop who pulled us over tonight for speeding en route to Chicago and who was more concerned with determining whether or not we’d stolen our car).

Riding the triplet demands teamwork and coordination. The person in front (the captain) is responsible for the safety and smooth operation of the bike. He steers, shifts, brakes, and keeps the team running in alignment. It’s much like driving a single bike, with the added dimension of extra length and weight – and the added responsibility of the wellbeing of two extra riders.  Those two riders provide the power (hence they are termed “stokers”), navigate (including reading maps and guidebooks), dispense the energy supplements, keep the captain entertained with witty banter and safeguarded with two extra sets of eyes on the road. Any stoker who is an experienced cyclist has to learn to allow the captain full control of the bike, relinquishing all engrained instincts to brake or veer when they see an obstacle ahead.  It is an exercise in letting go. And for all three riders, keeping the bike flowing smoothly means that we must be in the moment, which makes riding it a truly meditative experience.

Miranda writes: I’m very excited to go on a seven-day trip on the bike. I’ve brought bike shorts, jerseys, sunglasses, helmet, gloves, windbreaker, and rain jacket. We also decided to have a mascot on the bike so I bought a hedgehog. I’m proud to be raising money to help recycle bikes and send them to people who need them. I get to sit on the back of the bike and I get to help the captain look out for cars behind us.

If you have any questions, please email us at stuart.muir@huntington.com and we’ll be happy to answer you in the blog.

We are getting the bike ready, setting out our gear, mapping the journey, and reading the guidebooks. On 22 December we (Stuart and Marybeth) will pack the triplet atop the VW and drive from Columbus to Chicago to collect Miranda, and the next morning the three of us drive to Nashville for a night at a B&B. We take off on the bike the next morning - the morning of Christmas Eve. Our blog posts and photos will turn up regularly once we start cycling, so check back in then!