Carolinas-Florida Bicycle Tour

Day 2: More peanuts­ — peanut fields, that is. We made it to the border of North Carolina. There was an old concrete marker from 1887 showing the border and another nondescript traffic sign stating “STATE LINE”. No indication of what states it was the line between just that the line was there. If you have to ask… For lunch we had barbeque again in Sunbury, NC. This time it was more of what we gathered to be North Carolina style. (see BBQ entries.) The waitress said that they were the best BBQ around but had to ask her mom when I asked what exactly made it North Carolina style. We stayed at the BBQ joint for a while soaking in the a/c and got the first of many inquisitions about the bike trip. A lot of people are interested in where we’re going and coming from and we weren’t able to tell people much about where we’d come from at this point. But it is pretty cool when people ask, “Where are you heading?” and we get to answer “Florida.” Sometimes we get a positive reaction like, “Have a great trip,” or “be safe. But sometimes people ask if we’d gotten a bump on the head recently. Or as Hillary’s doctor asked, “What are you, fucking nuts?!?” We can all agree that so far it’s been an amazing trip though. So, after lunch at the BBQ place we bought a watermelon and some ears of corn from the back of a man’s pickup truck. I gave Hillary the tent, which I usually carry, and strapped the watermelon to the back of my bike and we rode to the campsite. The campsite was Merchant Millpond State Park. We all agreed that this campsite was better than the last one and we praised the state park system of North Carolina. (Now that we’ve been into this trip for seven days, we’ve learned to appreciate things that we normally wouldn’t appreciate like: state park campgrounds over small, local, private ones with permanent residents; laundry machines becase we’ve been doing all of our laundry by hand in sinks with ‘campsuds’; tailwinds; downhil slopes, even ever so slight ones; and more things we wouldn’t notice in our everday lives in NYC. We ate the watermelon and some pre-made indian food from Trader Joe’s that we got in NYC and hit the sack for a much-needed rest. Over the course of Day 2 we logged 57 miles, which wasn’t bad for the second day of the trip.

Southern Virgina and northern North Carolina are peanut country. There are more peanut fields than I thought existed. We started riding at about 6:00 pm on Tuesday the 18th after driving down to Dendron, VA from Summit, NJ during the day. A tube blowout delayed the commencement of the ride and we waited at a local gas station while new tubes were being bought by Kiki’s dad, Richard. However, before arriving at the starting point, we ate lunch at the very first BBQ place we saw and it was a great start to what we know will be a BBQ-fueled trip. We’ll have other entries that focus more on the BBQ, for now, I’ll just catch you all up to where we are with the general story so far.

Day 1 took us 23 miles though Virginia farm country. Meandering county roads led us through peanut and corn fields and the occasional swampy area. As the sun set, we found our way to the first destination: Blackwater Campground near Isle of Wight, VA. The campground seemed normal at first, but we began to realize that some of the campers and trailers on the sites were the permanent homes to some folks. It was a little sketchy and a large barking german shepherd scared us all a bit but we got the tents put up in the twilight and went to sleep without eating. In the morning we made some oatmeal and packed up camp, still figuring out the best ways to pack out bags and load our bikes. We got a relatively early start, leaving the campground at 8:30.