Veni, Vidi, Vici.

Less biking. More distance.

This biking thing is going better and better. I can actually feel that I’m having less trouble hauling my 25 kilo luggage around, keeping reasonable speeds no longer feels as if I’m climbing the Mont Ventoux 8 hours per day! Victory! As we would say in Dutch ‘De aanhouder wint’. I can actually say I’m a better biker. And the climate is getting more reasonable too: I no longer have to be on the bike at 6 in the morning to be able to get a few hours in there before excruciating heat. And to be fair, the whole getting up super early to exhaust myself on a bicycle was never really my thing. I enjoy taking my time in the morning, to take my time to wake up, maybe read a little bit, brew some coffee. I’m definitely not the kind of girl that can just get up, break down her tent and start biking like crazy again. But hey, distances of over a 100 km -praise the metric system!- per day now no longer seem like something only a professional rider could do. Victory!

Nothing is impossible until proven so. An important lesson I have learnt this week. Extremely last minute couchsurfing requests? – not a problem. Hitchhiking 600 km with a bicycle in one day? – Hard. But not impossible. Remind me of this in a couple of weeks when I’ll be struggling to find my first Big-Girl job: I hitchhiked 600 km with a bike. In one day. Finding a job should be a walk in the park now. 

I started this week in Charleston, and ended up in Washington DC. From Charleston it took me 2 days and 2 flats to get to a little place called Surfside beach – I was kind of disappointed not to have seen any surfers there -, where I spent 2 nights with a lovely young family. Here I started realizing that I had to make a choice. Sell my bike, and be able to actually see Washington, and maybe Philadelphia. Or bike, suffer, and not see anything of the country at all. I chose to bike to Fayetteville, where I would sell my bike and continue my trip hitchhiking. But hey, plans change! 

The next night I stay with Nick, on his wwoofing farm (www.wwoofing.com) in Tabor city. Nick is a self claimed ex-hippie -but to be fair, he still has a fair amount of hippie in him-, who invites volunteers into his house to help him in his organic farm, and in return they get to learn about organic farming. He tells me about a place called ‘South of The Border’, a tourist trap right off highway 95, and convinces me to try to hitchhike with my bike to DC. Why not? If it works, I would get to bike from DC to New York, and it would be truly amazing to actually bike into the Big Apple!

The next day I get to South of The Border at about half past 3 in the afternoon, I decide to give it a try for a couple of hours. No luck, people are not willing to take a smelly hitchhiker with a bicycle. Understandable. I camp out behind a church, and decide to give it another try the next morning, worse case scenario, I can always bike to Fayetteville and sell the bike there. At 12 I get thrown out of the gas station where I had been asking people for a ride. Auch. What to do?

I decide to give it one last shot, and actually stand on the ramp of the highway, in the hope that someone will pick me up! Bingo! 20 minutes later I’m on my way to Rocky Mount, a small town about a 150 miles north of where I was. From there I easily find a ride about 40 miles further. It’s already 4 o’ clock by then. Maybe I won’t make it to DC… I decide to try untill 6, and find a place to camp after that. 10 minutes before 6 I get picked up by … a 20 year-old chain smoking, gun carrying anglican priest -I really don’t know how to describe this person in any other way-. He drives around after work, because his parents won’t let him smoke by the house. He drives me past Richmond, just because.

After he drops me off at a truck stop, I don’t know what to do… it’s past 7, I should find a place to camp out. But on the other hand, I’m only about 150 km from DC. I could make it. And I did. I get a ride with a family of self-proclaimed gipsies, on their way to Washington. On the way, they make a quick stop. To get engaged. “It was perfect we ran into you”, they say, “now we have a photographer”. What a crazy perfect day. It ends with me, drinking a Leffe, in a Downtown DC apartment. Life isn’t all that bad.

So here I am. Enjoying the Capitol for a couple of days, before I hit the road again towards my final destination: New York City! I’ll make it. It will work out. It always does, as lang as I keep trying.           

Take me to New York

Another week. Another pit filled with adventures and stories to remember. Oh. and I hit my first big milestone this week: I biked a 1000 km since I left New Orleans. Only about 1500 or so to go. 

After leaving Panama City Beach, I was confident that luck would turn my way. It would, just not that day. It was the 3-flat day. After fixing the third one, I finally realized I should probably check my tire, and not just endlessly keep on fixing my tube. This was a good call: there was a big fat hole in the tire. Lesson learnt: when running a flat, always check if the tire is ok. Luckily, it was easy to temporarily (I will probably learn soon what temporarily means, somewhere in the middle of a forest or so) boot it with a one dollar bill – turns out those things are not just handy for strippers-. 

I thought it had learnt what it meant to be hot, untill day 2 of that week. A 110 degrees (43 degrees celcius), with a 100 % humidity. It’s like biking in a turkish steambath. Or a sauna. I decide to hitch a ride to Tallahassee, where I was going to be couchsurfing with Carol in , a girl who is planning a bike tour in South-America. You can only imagine all the things we had to talk about! It was absolutely reviving to be able to talk to a girl like we had been friends for ages, I realized how much I had been missing this all these months!

The rest of this week was one big chain of unforgettable couchsurfing experiences (and of course, some biking 😉 ). The morning I left Tallahassee, was probably even hotter than the day before. No way that I was going to bike through this. This weather would make hell feel like a pretty nice air conditioned space. So, I try to hitch a ride again. I get picked up by Evan, a thirty-something single guy from Jacksonville. Perfect. That’s where I wanted to go. Evan turns out to be an amazing guy, since I didn’t have a place to go before going to the next couchsurfer, Evan invites me to spend the afternoon in his house, where we have the best sandwich I had in weeks. And later that day he drives me to Jay’s house.

I feel like this post is going to be one big listing of all the amazing couchsurfing experiences I’ve had this week. But that’s really what my week was like. There’s just no other way to describe it. I never actually met Jay, but his roommates were just adorable. 3 middle aged, divorced men, living together, and non-stop hosting couchsurfers. Isn’t that amazing? And Glenda, an older woman, in Saint-Mary’s GA. She convinced me to let her take me to Cumberland Island (of which I had never heard). Reluctant at first, I agree to go with her, and stay a night in the house she takes care of on the island.

Little did I know that a private house on Cumberland is about as rare as the white deer I spotted there. All the private properties have been handed over to the State, and there are only 5 left that are still in the hands of private owners. When these people die, the state will take these properties too. Imagine staying in a house, on the middle of an island which is a natural reserve. What an amazing experience!

As promised, Glenda drove me to my next destination (lucky me ’cause it was pooring rain that day – the kind of rain that would instantly drown my dogs). In Townsend, I got to stay with the Smith’s for a night. The next morning, son McKinley drives me out to Savannah, where he works. From here I work my way up to Walterboro (South Carolina), where I stayed with the more than fabulous couple David and Jorge. David told me about another hosting platform, just for cyclists: Warm Showers. I’m hoping to finally start meeting other cross country riders! Because to be fair, it does get lonely sometimes…

And here I am, couchsurfing again, in Charleston. The way here was one of the most extremes I’ve lived so far. I almost filed a complaint against google maps. I got taken from dirt roads to biking on a highway (with no other way to go) to biking on the East Coast Greenway (the biking trail that will hopefully take me to New York) to biking on more highways. I had literally never been this scared in my life. The number of near death experiences was fairly high yesterday, hopefully it will get better!

New York, I’m getting closer!

PS: I forgot to mention the name that was given to my bike after a couple of beers in New Orleans. ‘Casanova’, because no-one gets quite between my legs like he does.