Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When I reached the reporter, a pleasant if slightly harried young woman named Retha
Colclasure who had driven frantically from another story to meet me in time, she was
setting up a camera on the side of the road, her own camerawoman, and we joked that if
I'd been carted away in a police van she'd have had a better story. We did a short inter-
view.
2
I was flattered, of course, but also amazed: How did she know about me? And how
did she know where to find me last night?
It was the guys from Hardee's. After lunch, they had called the station.
Thursday, September 1, Hillsboro, North Dakota
A word or two about perseverance, which is an essential—maybe
the
essential—carry-
on for a cross-country cyclist. If I didn't have it, it would be worth trading my rain gear
for it, and I say this having ridden much of the past two days in the rain. The secret
truth is that just about anyone can make a trip like this—you don't have to be in great
shape or own a top-flight bike—as long as you're willing to keep pedaling. If you can't
muster the desire to keep your legs going day after day, your physical condition won't
matter, and whatever you pack in your saddlebags won't, either.
It seems to me that everyone climbs on a bicycle with the same idea: a cruise in tem-
perate weather, pleasure masquerading as exercise. That's certainly what I have in mind
each morning when I load up my bike and take off for yet another strange motel fifty
or sixty miles down the road. There is always, of course, something waiting for me mere
moments into the day's ride to disabuse me of that vision. Maybe it's fog, as it was yester-
day, so that even though the two-lane backcountry highway doesn't carry much traffic,
I was worried about visibility, especially because the shoulder was narrow. At one point
I slowed for a rest and hit a small oil slick; my rear wheel slid out to the right and I
tumbled onto the roadbed. It was empty and quiet out there, fortunately, and I merely
bruised a knee and few knuckles.
Or maybe the humidity is high and the wind has a chill in it—also yesterday, so that
each time I stopped to rest, I froze.
Or maybe it's rain; it's raining now, in the morning, which is why I'm writing instead
of riding. It's sixty miles to my next stop—Minnesota ho!—and the wind is strong from
the west. The weather report is for clearing at noon, and I'm ready to roll as soon as it
does. You have to ride in the rain on a trip like this, but if you can avoid it, you do.
Two mornings ago, as I rode not quite fifty miles from Carrington to Cooperstown,
on straight-as-a-string, flat-as-a-pancake State Highway 200, the fog condensed into a
steady shower, and I had my first drenching since Day 2 of the trip. At the Coachman
Inn in Cooperstown, a highfalutin name for a behind-the-local-bar motel, I spent the af-
