Me, my bike, and I.

Panama Beach City: time to relax, and plan. Definitly Plan. That’s what I’ve learnt over the past week.

Before getting into my adventures, I’d like to comment on a topic that has really been bothering me for the past … 4 months, but really got to me this week: why can a girl not travel by herself?

Everywhere I go, almost every person I’ve talked to over the past 4 months during my travels has had the same reaction: you’re a girl by yourself? That’s super dangerous! You shouldn’t be doing this! Be careful! There are bad people out there. This has annoyed me SO MUCH. Not because people are worried about me, I know they all mean well. But because apparently, I am supposed to change MY plans, MY behaviour, MY being, because there are still people in this world that treat women by theirselves like shit, like something that is worth being treated badly. And this makes me very angry. Why don’t people keep more busy trying to get these Ideas out of the world, instead of warning women about things they can and cannot do? Why should I behave differently because someone else is a prick? Why should I be punished for that?

Sorry. I really needed to get that off my chest. Back to the story now: 

After spending a couple of days on Galveston Island in Texas – where I by the way got to hang out in the same bar as – wait for it- SWEET BROWN  (youtube it!) – , I took the train (The oh-so famous Amtrak, slower than the belgian NMBS) from Houston to New Orleans. Public transport is always an adventure in the US. Why, you ask? Well. There is none. And the few transports that do exist, seem to be unknown to anyone carrying a US passport. I swear on my new wheels (I’ll get to that later) that not even the local bus drivers can tell you where and when you can get a certain bus. 

Anyway, after an amazingly stunning 11 hour train ride, I finally make it to New Orleans. La Nouvelle Orléans. What a place. I still dream of it’s endless bars filled with Blues, Jazz, Grass, …, it’s beautiful small roads with picturesque little shops, the typical colored houses, the french street names, the Mississippi, and so on. After two days of wandering around in this amazing place, I hit the road again. Next Destination: Panama Beach City, in Florida.

When leaving New Orleans, I immediately feel like I made the right decision to start biking again here. There are bike roads, the climate is still hot, but a little more bearable than it was in Texas. On this first day, I make it to a little place close to Sidel, about 85 km from New Orleans, I find a small RV park, and camp out there for the night. Not bad for a first day! 

The next couple of days will be one big emotional roller coaster. And I am not prepared for that at all. I go from camping in the back of a church, after being rejected by 3 other churches, to people paying for spots on a campground, people inviting me into their houses (Thank you Jodie), being offered free camping space, to someone paying for an actual hotel room.

The hotel room day was probably the worst day of them all. Over all I had had a lovely week: camping in state parks, camping on the lovely Dauphin Island, taking the ferry off the island, being offered a ride for a couple of miles by a lovely family, and Jodie. She offered to drive me over a 3 mile long bridge to Pensacola beach Island, to a state park, where I was planning to camp out. Turns out the campsite was full, so she offered me to stay in her house, and fed me delicious smoothies! What a wonderful woman.

But by the day I was supposed to arrive in Panama Beach City, everything seemed to be going wrong. I could not find a place to stay, so I decided to bike a couple of miles back to a state forest. Once I get there, It turned out to be impossible to find the designated camp spots     … and it starts raining. No, raining would not be the right word to describe that. The whole forest turned into a freaking swamp in less than 2 minutes. On top of that, I run a flat. For some reason, this just breaks me. There I am, in the middle of a forest, all by myself, crying. I somehow manage to drag myself and my bike back to the road, and start fixing the flat. Ah, if only it had been just a flat… Once I fixed the tube (I am starting to turn into a real bike-mechanic!), I notice something else. My whole back wheel is – sorry for the language guys – fucked up. There are really no other words to put it. I panic. It’s at least 5 miles back to the closest town, and even there I wouldn’t find a place to stay…

But then… George stops. An invalid marine veteran, with a love for biking. He literally picks up what’s left of me, and offers me to stay with him in the nearby Marine NSA basis, where he has a room. He is retired, and bored, and adopts me as his new welfare project. Once we get to the base, we immediately get pulled over. It’s illegal to try to get into the base with someone of a foreign nationality. A second panic attack gets the upper hand of me: what if I get thrown out of the country? But, end good, all good: the officer could not fail to notice that I really wasn’t much more than a badly organised cross country biker! George ends up paying for a hotel room, for which I will be eternally grateful (especially since hotel rooms here cost about a month’s worth of travelling for me!). He finds some cheap second hand wheels for me in a pawn shop, and we fix the bike before lunch!

To be fair, I’m really not feeling like hitting the road again that day… I am suddenly hit by the fact that I should start planning things from now on, to avoid finding myself crying, in a forest, in the rain (yes it really could be a scene from a bad romcom). I decide to enjoy the free wi-fi of McDonald’s (the people who know me will know that this is really a sign of my desesperation – I would never go to McDonald’s, unless being very desperate or depressed). When I open my mailbox, I see I got a message from Billy, a couchsurfer, who invites me to stay at his house. Praise the Lord for Couchsurfing! And so here I am, in Panama City Beach, staying with Billy, planning my trip.

It’s been a rough week. And more rough weeks are to come. Hopefully I’ll get better at this. But I guess I learn a bit every day, right?

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