Setting out - The Impermanence Tour

The visual theme of this tour became impermanence.  I'll get into it later, but it became so striking a thing, to ride out of Washington’s suburbs into the ever-more-rural-feeling almost-wilderness that is America’s inland east coast.  The flight was inconvenient - landing at night - forcing me into an airport hotel.  

Always a relief to find you have all the bits and pieces -  Blue under the Eiffel Tower - in Dulles Airport

Onto dirt well outside Washington DC

It was harder than expected to escape the city’s reach.  Last time I rode here I went north-west.  It turns out – though one never thinks of it at the time – that the airport is on the north-western side of the city.  So you have escaped it already, as it were, while you roll towards Leesburg.  This time proved different, I was traveling in an SSE direction – with all the city’s suburbs to negotiate.  Like trying to ride across Pretoria.  It took two hours, in what was for me uncomfortable cold – an icy wind chewing away at my right flank.  I’d got up in the morning, put on sunscreen, and left just after sunrise.  It was 2 degrees  (and warmed up to a stingy 11 eventually, the sunscreen proved pointless in the fullness of time – I rode in long kit with long gloves the whole day). Once out of the city limits the suburban quickly gave way to unpaved roads and rural bridges across rivers; fantastic American eye-candy.  Tyre technology is an interesting thing.  The difference between a low rolling reistance and higher resistance tyre is 100%.  Literally.  Most of this tech is in the side-wall of the tyre.  I've been riding Schwalbe Marathons - German tech at its very best.  Super slippery side-walls with a kevlar strip under the tread.  I've not had a puncture in almost 3 years of cycling - including two fully loaded tours (touch wood, touch wood - India next).  They chowed the gravel - literally no difference to cycling on tar - though it helped that the roads themself were without corrugation - that surface satan of the gravel bike tour.  By lunch-time I had made it to the town of Remington - population 598 (according to the 2010 Census - and I think likely to have been depleted in the years since).  The American civil war happened all around this area, specifically in the case of Remington, the first and second Battles of Rappahannock Station.  The town itself was delightful - and unusually had a fantastic little diner.

Missing now from much of small town America -  Remington's delightful diner The Corner Deli

In retrospect I made a mess of the first day.  I was posessed with the scale of the whole, inclement weather, distance, uncertainty, ambiguous winds... and so pounded it out of the gates.  I've not ridden 150ish km with a loaded bike since the early 90s.  So why do it now?  Behaving like a newbee.  As it turns out, paying the newbee price.  The allure?  A big start to calm the nerves and the goal of Lake Anna in mind.

Out on the backroads which in this case was surprisingly tarred.  No lines, signs that some oke did a burnout at some point.
Further down this road I'd have my first proper get chased by a dog moment - bastard was quick, fortunately the slope was
in my favour and I managed to put on enough speed.

I've never been a huge fan of big dogs.  Granted, I loved our Labarador when I was growing up - but that was a well trained labarador.  It seems odd to have a pretty robust carnivore cohabiting - even if generally they prefer to bite people other than their owners.  Historically I have been one of those other people.  This trip did not disappoint.  Somewhere out in the hills, literally not having seen a house or a car for a decent length of time, and cruelly, just after I'd been taking pictures of the beautiful forest with it's dappled afternoon light - I heard a vicious snarling bark and teeth bared, from absolutely no-where, a German Shephard came bulleting out of the undergrowth onto the road, followed by another.  There was no-where to go.  I jumped off the bike, positioned it between myself and bloody Cujo and his mate.  It kept coming.  I grabbed out a water bottle and squirted a jet of water out in it's direction - which was surprisingly (and delightfully) effective.  Cujo backed off a few steps - still barking like a nutter - and gave me that fraction of space to start walking my bike slowly off the road.  There were a lot of fallen branches on the ground, so I managed to bend down and pick up a hefty one that I could wave around a bit.  At this point Cujo's chommie started circling around the other side of me, and I really thought that I was in a spot of bother.  Alone in America - a country where everyone has guns - why do I not have a gun?!  I really want a gun.  I kept walking the bike off the road, and then - DELIGHT - some nice hefty rocks.  Party time.  In no time I'd got busier than a Protea doing outfield practice - and was raining down projectiles on the now retreating fiends.  Keeping my trusty branch in hand I headed off - amazingly the knee was no problem - belted it up the hill - but noticed that Cujo's chommie kept trotting along the road in the distance behind me.

There be demons out in those woods; demons unbeknown

Not my photo- obviously - but it's a serious piece of water - and you have to be smart about where you end up on it.

Off the beaten track on a bike, the options narrow as the shadows lengthen - so the Lake Anna Lodge it was.  And I think they understand the equation.  U$70 got one a very nasty smelling room, a chewed up stained towel, and no soap (rectified by marching to the office and demanding some) but plenty of hot water and the best feeling shower I've had in absolute ages.

Doesn't look too bad if you cant smell it :-)   One light.  One pilow.  A suspect towel. No soap.

 And while the motel's isolation made it the only choice around, so too did it's attached bar - which was absolutely rocking with a festive group of Friday night locals by 7pm.  The burger was great.  The Devil's Backbone beer cold, and after a few hours the Motel started looking like the Mandarin Oriental.

Getting down in Chelsea Jo's Restaurant-Sports Bar,  Spotsylvania County.
I loved the bikey jacket - assault rifles arranged in a cross around a skull - this is America

Day 1 Washington DC to Lake Anna Lodge - 147km

Into the Impermanence Tour

Life behind bars, as they say.  Rolling on Big Blue

Comfort is impermanent.  A lack of injury is too.  Skin on your ass is impermanent.  Youth, in all its forms is impermanent.  Having felt nothing getting up, showering, walking the bike out (there was no coffee, no breakfast, the bar which had duf duf duf'ed well into the wee hours was definitely not open), I felt a violent stab of pain to the right knee as I started pedaling.  I laid off it, kept the pedals turning, and eased down into the icy fog enshrouding Lake Anna.  By the time I crossed the bridge and started up the slope on the other side I felt that I was in trouble.  The 150 party the day before was definitely making itself felt.  On the other side of the bridge was a filling station and cafe type place (run by an Indian dude from Amdebad - where I will be cycling to next month).  I stopped for a prolonged breakfast, took out the tools and made as many changes to the seat, bike and pedal setups as I could.  The thinking, in short, is to try and change the shape of everything so that I wasn't pushing in exactly the same shape as I had been all day before.  I'm not sure how well it worked, but relying largely on Lazy Leftie, it eventually got a bit warmed up and started feeling better. Big lesson on being dumb, looking at the whole rather than parts, and reacting to feeling anxious.  Feeling better, I started cruising, picking up the pace, and making use of puffs of tail-wind.  The scenery became eyewatering - lightly inhabited space - but also signs of economic retreat, run down small-holdings in the forest, homes once peopled now overgrown; the echoes of lives once lived in a toothless basketball backboard with falling rings and bearded whisps of rotten netting; impermanence.  The peri-urban middle class squeezed from the land to the more densely populated places, nearer to the 7-11 jobs.

Big Blue, on the bridge over the James River, on the way to the delightfully named Farmville.  The James River plays a
significant part in the history of the settling of the US, the early transport of tobacco and slaves, and the civil war itself.

I know I sent you this from the road, with a quip about real estate dilemmas for ex smokers -
but it was interesting how big tobacco was still on the backroads - and the tree was so autumn beautiful.

I seemed to have seen the movie "Witness" a million times.  At some point, it was part of a high school english curriculum that I was teaching.  And it's a movie I love, and a way of life that I wonder about - what happens to people when they step away from technology - slow down and intentionally be with each other.  At the same time I'm clear about the irony of writing a sentence like that, on a blog, written for my son the engineer.  After seeing the sign below, I read a bit about the Amish, and where they have settled in America.  It's really interesting, and a sizeable overall community of a quarter of a million people.

Amish country - and the spirit of community that has cars pass bicycles as if they are trucks taking up a whole lane.

The end of the day, knee operating but definitely not fine, and some serious saddle sores (from which I have been eternally saved by Prep - the shaving cream - in short the difference between being sore and not being able to sit down at all) found me in Farmville 124 kms from the lake.  Farmville is pretty cool, it has two small universities, and a population of 8000+ including an excellent laundromat which allowed me to catch up on two days of long garment riding.

Big Blue - unlucky room 111 - Day's Inn in Farmville.  It was FANTASTIC compared to Lake Anna's lowly Lodge

Day 2 - Lake Anna Lodge to Farmville - 125km

Impermanence is also the loss of value and skills - I can't tell you how rare it seems that someone cooks something to sell as food in the tiny towns.  (And it was in this respect that I was thinking about the Amish way of life - it's as if that's what it takes).  Everything available in the small towns to the public was hyperprocessed and pre-packaged.  Tinkie food, both sweet and savoury. 

Farmville (perhaps in the spirit of its name) had a couple of Italian restaurants however.  Once showered up, iced kneed and Prep-assed, I set forth with laundering intent and a hunger as large as a plains sunset.  The Day's Inn is unfortunately not in the town centre, which I had ridden through, but in the less salubrious outskirts - 4 km away.  I was not getting back on the bike, and there are zero Ubers and taxis in the back and beyond, so armed with the washing I marched across the road to a gas station and asked a couple in a car if they were going into town and whether I could have a lift.  They looked fractionally startled, but in the spirit of American hospitality - which is a massively real thing - they gave me a lift and worked hard at rewarding them for that with an endorphin fuelled effort of massive warmth and cheerful gratitude.  The laundromat itself was fantastic in this space - I just know zero about laundromats - and the locals were massively obliging and helpful.  Folding washing is one of the last great social acts: it requires just that bit too much attention and hand eye co-ordination to be on a phone, so you end up chatting to the other people there, and people in the Farmville Laundromat were very keen to chat.  By the time I left, dangerous hunger had set in, and I hit the restaurant and ordered a large pizza.  That's a word that still means something in America.  I went hard at it, but at best made my way through (close to) a half.  The rest came back to the Day's Inn - via a student bus (which the restaurant staff kindly informed me about - 25c was the fare - that's great value by any standard).  The students on the bus had declined the offer of pizza (!?!) - thankfully - when you wake up and it's freezing and cold, pizza in bed as a breakfast prelim is a quality decadence that a bike tour deserves.

Waking up in Farmville - breakfast of champions

Struggling in the Impermanence Tour

I woke up to freezing rain.  And in case that sounds like hyperbole - 2 degrees centigrade, and bucketing down.  It's thing about seasons - they really dont matter in places that dont really have them.  I was pretty light on warm riding stuff that would stay dry (ish, even).  I streched the departure as long as was possible - eventually heading out into the horror at 11.30am

Blue ready to go - owner not so keen - cold and wet and just kak generally.  Knives in the knee for extra suffering.  

All in all it was a minus zero fun shit day - with cannoning wind and freezing rain.  I'd set my sights on the town of South Boston - 93km away - and it felt like I was trying to ride to the moon.  Dark dark places out on that road.  What on earth am I doing here?  Why don't I rent a U-haul (unhelpfully I rode past some) and drive to Greensboro?  It went on.  I stopped every chance I got, guzzled calories and coffee.  Eventually the knee warmed up to being only mildly savage.  I'd dealt with the other side of my other problem by applying great scoops of Prep directly to the pad inside the bike shorts - bring on the ass volcano darling.

Putting on a brave face - drenched and miserable on the side of some perpetual
stretch of highway.

By the afternoon there were patches of "it's not raining, its just plain old cold" appearing.  But I had crawled over the hump, coffeed and hotdogged and say-no-to-u-haul van'ed my way 92km through the nastiness to the town of South Boston - population 8142 in the 2010 census (down a few hundred from the 2000 census).  It's probably unremarkable - but to me oasic - and I was especially pleased to see the Fairfield Inn and Suites.

It's that Marriott smile - this is how good one feels arriving after a day of freezing rain.

Nice room, nice laundry facilities - but nowhere to eat, a by-now-familiar-problem.  This time the hotel was only about a ten minute walk to what I was assured was a great restaurant, the Mexico Viejo Mexican Grill. And it was; it really really was.  Fantastic.  The only challenge was getting there.  Walking seems to be part of impermanence in America.  Between the restaurant and the hotel, no street lights, no sidewalk, just a dual carriage main road, with cars barreling down it.  I had on black jeans and a dark blue jacket, black shoes... had to go back to my room to get my bike lights.  One in each hand I flashed and strobed my way to mexican paradise :-)

Day 3 - Farmville to South Boston - 91km

Perfection in Impermanence

I had spent the whole of the previous day promising myself that if I just kept going I could have an easy day the next, from South Boston to Yanceyville - a mere 61 kilometers.  But when I woke up there were a couple of interesting facts to contend with.  The rain was gone, it was bright and warm - and according to my wind app, there was going to be a tail wind for the morning, changing to a headwind in the second part of the afternoon.  Furthermore, the weather forecast for the following day was rain again ... and given the suffering so recently experienced, it seemed that the idiom "make hay while the sun shines"  was entirely apt - kilometers of hay, while the sun shines.  In addition, the motel on offer in Yanceyville was one star and had review comments like, "cleanliness could be improved" and more directly "That was one of the worst hotels that I have ever been to. I had to sleep on top of the bed, and it was just filthy and nasty" ... so out of bed I climbed, and onto the road I got - setting sail for Reidsville, 94 kilometers away.  And what a day it was.  So, impermanence... the value of pushing through the awfulness of the previous day's icy rain, the knee daggers, the skin-missing-ass, the volcano Prep - is to have a day like this; with confidence I can say it's the best day's cycling I've had in the past 25 years.  

Killer skies and space, weirdness of course, in this case the Alton International Airport.

The North Carolina state line.  Interesting how the road-lines started exactly at the border; it was a great road.  

Almost empty meandering roads, not much in the way of hills or traffic.

The lunch of champions.... kindly invited into a golf club restaurant.

The (of course) super-friendly and engaging stop-go sign operator - road-works in North Carolina.

Maybe North Carolina's roads used to be dreadful, and I happened to co-oncide with their improvement?  I say this because they were simply fantastic - out on the backroads I seemed to be traveling new blacktop only - and with a tailwind, just flying.  The way the stop-go's work for the road crews is also fascinating.  They have a lead and a following car (massive bakkie of course) with a billion lights, and these drive back and forth on one lane (in this case while the other gets it's paint lines), escourting a line of about 10 to 15 vehicles.  This posed a bit of a challenge for me, because there was no way that I was going to be able to keep up with the convoy on the uphills, the stop-go sign guy was unfased.  In that wonderfully American reassurance of "you allright" - he sent me off with the instruction to ride on the unused lane, but when I reached it, not on the new paint of course.  The new paint was miles off - so I had the surreal experience of having a perfect, unpainted, wide new road entirely to myself unless a convoy happened to be passing - which they did infrequently - and just the silence of the woods on this fabulous strip of tar.  Perfection.

Day 4 - South Boston to Reidsville - 101km

Impermanence itself

The impermanence I think I felt most was the space between what I was seeing, and it’s relationship to myself.  I wasn’t aware of imagining a life, but I must have at some point.  Some important, but unspoken part of it was about owning a house, and creating a home.  And it troubles me still; on one hand something undone, but probably more because I crave the imagined peace that it seems to represent, that I’ve arrived somewhere, and can sigh and fall back into it, into this place where I belong.  Home.  And instead I’ve been in flux, on the move, traveled and travelling, endlessly.  And I can’t shake the sense that something is missing.  Riding through rural America, two things seemed so apparent; firstly that this is a broad human need, this arriving and belonging; secondly that its permanence is entirely false.  Everywhere were houses and homes of those departed, not to be filled.  The very way of living that those ex-homes represented, itself proved impermanent.  And all of those people must have felt the finality of roots that I crave and seek – but time blows it all away.  You can avert your eyes from the clock, but your ears always hear its tick. 

To put it in a local context, perhaps it is like the suburban houses of Pretoria, wonderful things, but victims of time too; slowly but surely they are giving way to the gated community, the town house complex, the golf estate – the more collective than individual. 

I’m not sure whether to refer to the back-roads of Virginia and North Carolina as rural America.  There is something about it that is not really rural, more sparsely inhabited – a collection of small-holdings and small farms arranged around small, and consistently shrinking towns.  That shrinking is the impermanence of that way of life. 

The poverty that is the hand pressing down on that space, squeezing the lives out of it and into the cities is very real, and encroaching.  It may not be poverty in the sense of the shanty-townships of South Africa, but it’s not that far off, and there is a sense of it coming; the eyes are out there in the darkness, closing in.  And that is a massive impermanence.  You can see it in the people, rugged, weather-beaten, physically compromised, missing teeth.  Where we have tik, peri-urban America has tweakers and opioids – the latter being a particular challenge in the areas I’ve been riding through.  There is stuff missing, despite the rural feeling space.  Wholesome food and healthy robust country physiques seem scarce.  Readily accessible healthcare seems too.

There is a really striking paradox, riding through America, which I mentioned to and ended up discussing with a German originating academic on my CCL program, Michael Hoppe.  On the one hand there is the hugely impressive personal and individual commitment to helping others that I’d observed in America.  It’s everywhere.  Its in the numbers of volunteer fire services that you ride past in the back and beyond (for example, an amazing statistic – 70% of all US firefighters are volunteers.  100% of firefighters in small communities (10,000 people or less – so all the places that I’ve mentioned on this trip) are volunteers).  It’s in the friendliness of people who stop to ask you if you want some water.  It’s in the invitation to lunch at the golf course even though you are sweaty and dressed in lycra.   And then on the other hand there is the vehement rejection of any sorts of hand-outs or welfare thinking; a rejection of the free lunch offer, so to speak.  Think about this for a moment: on a personal level, you have a person who, for zero pay, on their own time, will volunteer to run into a burning building and risk everything to help a person-in-need who they don’t know.  But that same person is likely to be completely opposed to any form of welfare system, something that supports a wide range of people-in-need.  It’s understandable, but none-the-less fascinating.  I’d find much more plausible the person who was willing to pay something (a tax, for example) to a fund which employed firefighters, so they didn’t have to do it themselves.   Either way, Michael Hoppe said to me that he had been struck by this paradox when he first came to America, and that he had come to realize that Americans are willing to do anything personal to help an individual in need, but resisted strongly the idea of systematic support of people in need, and the government and welfare system that would necessarily come with it.  Fascinating.

The end of Impermanence - Greensboro

The perfection of the ride to Reidsville was also in the inclemency of the weather the following day.  More rain and headwinds - but with the end in sight a mere 42 km away, one feels bouyed and the load lightened.  Ongoing icing of my knee in the evenings, proper warm-ups and stretching in the morning, and a healthy diet of regular anti-inflammatories were delivering some power back to my right leg.  Leftie was feeling fit with all the extra work done in the days before.  

On a bridge in North Carolina - matching bike and clothes you'll note.

 I had some calls in the morning, and another in the afternoon, so I just hammered the last bit in two hours with photo stops on the way.  The scenery, despite the weather, was fantastic America all the way.

The outskirts of Greensboro - the big dog arrives.

On Big Blue at a traffic light in Greensboro - the season's leaves landing.

Day 5 - Reidsville to the O'Henry Hotel in Greensboro - 42km

All in all I rode just over 500 kms - about 20kms more than Knysna to Cape Town via the N2, to put it in perspective.  What takes five and a bit hours by car, takes four and a half days working hard under human power. 

Arriving in Greensboro was one sort of joy - the hotel was entirely another.  It's a long journey, both figuratively and literally, from the Lake Anna Lodge to the O'Henry Hotel of Greensboro.  Standing in the lobby, literally dripping, I was asked (ever so slightly frostily) "How can I help you ... sir" to which I could answer with a super endorphin cheer "I am coming to stay with you for a few days".

The lounge at the O'Henry Hotel.

My group at CCL - superbright interesting people.  The first part of the program was
FANTASTIC.

I will try to describe what I learned along the way in some other form - but it really was an incredible (and frankly, quite humbling) experience that I feel hugely motivated by.  I will however leave you with this anecdote which made me laugh: one of the group activities was in a big room, and your group had to unpack something from a box and assemble it.  Of course the learning was much more fiendishly clever than the task (which I could do with closed eyes, practically), but it was none other than to assemble ... a bicycle :-)

At the end of it all I was spinning with questions and doubts and optimism and life-regret and all the stuff that a killer learning confrontation contained.  I had not really planned my trip back to Charlottesville where I'm working for the first four days of this week - but thankfully my delightful colleague Craig Linqvist stepped in - he'd driven down in his absolute beast of a bakkie - and I didn't even need to take one of the wheels off to fit big blue in.

Rollin with The Linqvist - what a touring bike limo really looks like.

Beach action on the public holiday

The MTR remains closed down, city seems on edge, what to do?  Run 10kms while it's still rainy, and then go to the beach for a skim and a swim in the October windy season surf.  You won't see it in these pics, but if you waited around out at the back-line there were some cool waves by HK standards.

Ev opted for long skins, I think the colour match was coincidental.  

I love them skimming because it's such a great bit of outdoor cardio at a time when
all their football matches are cancelled and everyone has a dose of cabin-fever

Aiden heads down range - its a cool beach, Shek O.

Ev executes a spin, hard to see in a single shot, but the board is facing backwards, half way round.

Doesn't always work out of course - the long clothes saved skin for sure.

And so onto Sunday

Despite some disquiet about the city, which is bugging me... its hard to see how this plays out... it's been a lovely day because no-one can really go anywhere other than local.  My current bike saddle is on it's last legs (touring saddles have tension bolts so you can adjust them as they stretch), so I thought I better buy a new one (the one below) and set about breaking it in (they being like new leather boots).  It's a thing of beauty.  I've ridden a number of 25s and 45s on it - seemed fine.  So yesterday I rode 70+ and instead of breaking it, it broke me: literally, raw ass in places. wtf.  So with appropriate medication, I took a break from riding today and rebuilt the touring version - carrier mounts for panniers... and the old saddle back again.  Bloody hell.

Fiddly little awkward places, washers and spacers...

Plenty of help from the inquisitive cat

The finished article.  God damn its so cool :-) With the old saddle though - once bitten.

So instead - isolated life out in the New Territories

On the day following the pandemonium that trashed the MTR, out here in paradise the usual, more rural problems were being dealt with; in this instance a sizable python was caught in Siu Hang Hau, if you go down the hill from our house and take the first right.  It would make short work of the good Holly .... who is safe and sound fast asleep on the laundry basket :-)

Ev, I think motivated by a school project, has used YouTube to teach himself how to knit.

Hong Kong's protests - the stuff that can't be ignored.

The Hong Kong protests are a strange and divisive thing.  I feel that it would be really weird not to say anything about them.  So here goes - in the knowledge that this is one lay person's perspective. I can see on one hand how they are driven by inequality, and a rudderless, faux administrative take on leadership that people are understandably sick of.  I can see how people are not optimistic about their futures - which also seems a strange right to want to exercise?  The police, who to my thinking were much more of a get granny's cat out of the tree and arrive in force when someone sees a snake type service have been ineffectual, ambiguous in their loyalties, and not been cut any slack by the public at large.  Then suddenly it all seemed to explode on Friday night into an absolute orgy of (in my view) dimwitted-ness and vandalism, targeted at the MTR.  It's an interesting target - if you want to mess this city's ability to function up, it's the obvious choice.  And I'm left wondering why its a private company (I suppose more lets privatise everything - and further fuel inequality) when it's so strategically central and necessary to the city?  Anyway, the MTR corporation seems in one part to have been judged complicit in allowing gangsters to beat up the public, or keeping train doors open so that police can thrash passengers - who knows - the only thing that seems completely clear is that sensible has left the room.  And so here is the result - in short the MTR is shut, and has been properly thrashed.  I was cycling yesterday morning - and because of it - the queues of normal people trying to get to work on a Saturday (already a bummer) were snaking around the building blocks - at six in the morning.  And I just think fuck that, pointless, backward stepping, clueless - not going to change anything - least of all for the less fortunate who live miles from work and rely on it entirely.  These were sent to me by a friend of mine - inside Admiralty station - a major interchange.  I rode past Hang Hau and Tseung Kwan O - and they looked similar from the outside. 

Ticket booth 

Another ticket booth

Turnstiles smashed...

Now I understand that there is a human story to all of this - but I just don't get stuffing up the thing that everyone relies on, to go to the doctor, to go to work.  And then on top of it, those clad in black, fearing for their futures, also smashed all the traffic lights in the streets around the stations - so the traffic, already bewildering, just won't function.  The youth should try fearing the present.