Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 50) Bike trip from Tampa to New Orleans

After Chicago, instead of settling into another grindstone job, I took a vacation.

Another vacation you say?

I was 28 and my whole life had been a vacation of sorts up to that point.

I worked 21 months in Chicago, but rarely worked any previous year, living mostly off my parents.

But now I had money in the bank … and flew to Tampa with my bicycle for a travel-camp-out voyage headed to New Orleans. I carried a tent and bottle for water and a journal … everything I needed … and strapped it to a metal rack on the back of the bike and rode heavy out of Tampa heading north on Route 19.

What a time … I’d never seen the tropics or white birds … or palm trees … or all-aluminum single-pane windows …

It was March and the temperatures were 50-70ish so the riding was easy, except the prevailing wind was from the northwest and I pedaled 9 of the 10 days against a headwind. On two consecutive days, that big ole single-gear bike managed only 15 miles in a wind so strong it blew me to a stop twice.

One day I rode all day long in the pouring rain. That day I ran into another cyclist coming from the other direction. We stood under an awning and talked for ten minutes. I told him about a stretch of highway that had no place to stop or get water for about 40 miles. It was a huge marshy-swamp with nothing but straight road as far as you could see. I think it was route 89.

When I passed through that area I got so thirsty that I flagged down a pick-up truck. The fella was nice enough to stop.

I asked for water but all he had was a bucket he kept filled for his dogs in the back of the truck. Shit, it didn’t matter to me, that water tasted sweet. He said it never killed his dogs so it was probably ok, lol.

The ground was cold at night. I figured out pretty quick to put brush under the tent so I could stay warm. I never camped out before … our family never did fun stuff like that. We never took vacations.

I ate at restaurants and encountered surprisingly few problems making my way across the land. I camped in the sand dunes at Denton and woke up to see the most glorious sunrise rushing silently upward before the road filled with cars. It was cold that morning.

But you know, it’s the sound of traffic that makes the road so un-human … with an endless scrawl and clang that pounds up off the pavement. People despise the noise of traffic, yet everyone thinks the rumble of a freight train is comfort in the night. Who can explain it?

In ten days of riding, I had 7 interesting travel stories: each fitting within the boundaries of ordinary human activity: A car with three black guys tried to hit me with a wrench (I blocked the shot); two vehicles intentionally drove close; An RV’s side mirror nipped me on the shoulder (the guy didn’t stop); A log-truck with logs hanging out over the shoulder almost killed me (luckily I looked back and saw him coming); a cow eating grass on the shoulder panicked when I approached and he ran across the road directly in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler (the truck missed throwing the cow back on top of me by a foot or two); and then one weird encounter with a family I flagged down for directions.

Now this may be totally wrong about that family in the station wagon; but when I flagged them down at a wye in the road, asking which route was the highway, the woman at the passenger window pointed to the other road as the correct direction, and then pointed down the road they were going and said, ‘that’s a dead-end down there.’ She gave a slight emphasis on the word ‘dead,’ at which time one of the boys in the back seat laughed. I didn’t like the word or the laugh.

Ok is it total paranoia? Or did I meet the family from Kansas that traveled around the country and captured people and had sex with the hostages and had sex with each other in a never-ending orgy that included killing and burying the captives like garbage?

That’s all I’m going to say about it, except at the time, my radar said ‘get away from these people,’ and I peered over my shoulder the next few miles, in earnest hope they wouldn’t show back up.

A year or so later, 1979-81, when the Kansas flock was arrested, the newspaper reported that the police separated the people for questioning, but when the mother saw one of the sons in the hallway, she delightfully referred to him as ‘you sex fiend, you’ … and when I read that in the paper, my mind immediately flooded back to that family in Florida.

Anybody can be on the road and everybody travels somewhere. False intuition or good measure of those people? I dunno, I didn’t go down that road and check out their bungalow.

The bike ride to New Orleans burned Chicago completely out of me and I was a million miles away only ten days later.

Chapter 51) Salt Lake City
Chapter 52) Vegas, LA, and back to Indiana
Index of chapters