Author: amy

The past few days we’ve been bicycling through the South Carolina Low Country.

 Most of the countryside we’ve been biking through has been swampland and estuaries. When I think of a swamp, I usually think of a desolate wasteland, with buzzards and some grasses for ground cover, perhaps a dead tree or two.

However, the swamps we’ve been biking through have been living forests. Ancient deciduous trees, festooned with Spanish moss and vines, arch their way over the access roads we’ve often been traveling on. Occasionally we’ll be passed by a logging truck carrying a full load of fresh-smelling cedar trees.

Our first day out of Wilmington we found a secluded spot in a very old (non-swampy) forest to camp (there wasn’t much else in the area). The next morning we woke up early and biked seventeen miles to Waffle House, a southern chain we were looking forward to dining at. Now that we’ve increased our mileage average from ~35 to ~60 miles, our appetites have increased from merely elevated to absolutely ludicrous. The Waffle House managed to more than satisfy our ludicrous appetites; next time we’ll skip the extra side of biscuits and gravy. I was very impressed by the minimalist efficiency of the Waffle House. The line cooks had specialized call-and-response language they would use to communicate when a waffle was almost done and how many more they would need to start cooking. The industrial waffle maker itself looked like a car from the 1960s, which I assume was when it was manufactured. None of their ingredients appear to be too perishable: Eggs and white flour will last for a while, and both corn syrup and butter-flavored partially-hydrogenated cottonseed oil should last indefinitely. I can completely understand why they are the last restaurants to close before a major storm: see the Waffle House Index.

That evening, we bicycled to Conway, a College town a few miles inland from Myrtle Beach. Two old family friends from Egypt, Mike and Lisa, moved from Egypt to Conway almost 20 years ago to teach at the university there. I was so grateful to see them after not seeing much else in the area. They were very hospitable, and we spent many hours reminiscing about our shared memories and watching their pet rabbit, Hunter, hop about. Mike has the same awesome sense of humor I remember so well from my childhood. The next morning they sent us on our way, “Groucho Marx style,” with some hard-boiled eggs. For lunch we went to a Food Lion, divided a large platter of supermarket cornbread in half, and put some of the hard boiled eggs on top. It was better than the Waffle House.

After a few days of uneventful riding we arrived in Charleston, SC. We stayed with a couple on Warmshowers, Charles and Missee. Charles was busy planning a large group bike ride with his friends from Raleigh. We enjoyed seeing a picture book of the Southern Tier ride to San Diego that he did with a number of people a few years ago. Missee made us grits both mornings, one with cheese and one with eggs.

Charleston seemed like a nice walkable city. The central peninsula has a similar history and geography to Manhattan; a fort protected from the Native Americans by a wall, at the end of the peninsula, then expansion northwards and to adjacent peninsulas with bridges. We loved walking through the preserved downtown section. It seems like the entire area has managed to survive architecturally over the past few hundred years; no Robert Moses to bulldoze entire blocks of old buildings. Further north, past a buffer of chain stores, was the part of Charleston I would probably chose to live in, a bit cheaper, some breweries, and an amazing modern art space. The brewery I wanted to go to – Palmetto Brewing Co – was closed on the day we were in town, but the campground we stayed at last night had cans of their ‘Island Wit’ for sale.

On our second night in Charleston, Missee cooked Amy and I a wonderful dinner of chicken soup with roast turkey breast and vegetables, and we spent a lovely few hours talking about our past travels and separate lives. Apparently we have the Middle East in common; her daughter’s family is currently deployed to the naval base in Bahrain. Her family is in the music store business. Francis Ford Coppola is one of their clients; they tune his piano at this country house he maintains in the area. They had a lot of respect for my mother’s work as a community piano teacher in Egypt. We left them feeling well fed and happy.

After all that we biked another 70 miles to a campground – the first campground we’ve stayed at since the night before Wilmington, and are currently preparing to bike to Savannah, GA today.

That’s it for now!

-Jim

Since our last long blog post we’ve left the southern reaches of Pennsylvania, traversed Maryland and Washington DC, and arrived in the northern reaches of Virginia. The terrain and the culture are getting much more southern.

With regards to the terrain, there are far fewer pine trees and more incredibly verdant deciduous forests. Some parts of Maryland almost seemed tropical, with ferns growing out of gaps in stone walls, and strange giant fruit littering the ground alongside fallen black walnut fruit and copious quantities of acorns. The insects are also getting a lot larger. Amy just noticed a very imposing spider with a body the size of a nickel (total size about the size of a poker chip) in the laundry room at the campground where I’m writing this blog post.

The temperature is also rising, although this may be due to a temporary heat wave more than the latitude. When we finish the day Amy and I are usually caked with sweat and salt. This makes us very exciting to our friends’ dogs. Our bikes carry about 1.80 liters of water each, so we haven’t yet run out of water. Usually if the day is hot we’ll run into a 7-11 or gas station periodically to get a cold soda. On one particularly warm day we purchased an entire bag of ice and filled up all our water bottles with it, using the remainder in the bag as a giant cold compress.

The culture is a bit more difficult to describe; there are more sweetened drinks, especially tea, on sale in convenience stores; we’ve eaten some barbecue. There are different accents, and people seem more polite, and at the same time, a bit more difficult to parse than the people we’re used to interacting with. Earlier today we were loitering outside a convenience store and a shopper told us that the clerk had asked us to move our bikes. No explanation as to why was given. Were were breaking some sort of moral code? Being an eyesore? Did we look suspicious? Why didn’t the clerk come out and tell us himself? I get the feeling that different cultural mechanics may be at work here.

The past week or so we’ve been mostly staying with friends, and our camping has been to a minimum.

Our first meeting with a familiar face was with Al, my father’s mentor and thesis advisor.

The last time that I saw Al was when he was visiting my family circa 2003, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he hasn’t aged a day since then! After a delicious lunch he took us back to his house and we saw his beautiful collection of birds. One of his oldest parrots, Zoltan, used to perch on my mother’s shoulder while she held me as an infant. Zoltan is still alive and well – I’ve always been impressed by the longevity of parrots.

Our friends Steve and Tatiana were next on our route. Tatiana went to university with Amy and I in 2006, and we both remember her very well from that time. Since then we’ve seen her and her husband a few times, most recently at our wedding a month ago (it’s hard to believe it’s been a month – it feels at the same time like more and less time than that has passed). They purchased a row house in the Canton district of Baltimore, and have a real plan for retrofitting it.

I was really impressed how they seemed to have a *plan* for their long term life together. I only wish we had as much of a sense of certainty as they seem to. Steve and Tati are excited about craft beer and we sampled a few at a local bar. The most memorable one for me was a grapefruit radler (the German equivalent of a shandy), from Austria. I was reminded of our bike trip along the Danube in 2015, which was in many was the genesis of this trip. Tati, Amy and I also visited the AVAM, a museum of outsider and other experimental art. Both evenings were spent playing board games together.

Our next stop after Baltimore was to visit Mary and Doug. They used to live in Egypt in the 2000s and were very close to my parents. My brother and their youngest were inseparable rascals as five year-olds. They live in a house on the very northern edge of suburban DC, yet still within ready reach of the metro. I felt very much at home staying with them; we spent two great evenings drinking wine on their porch reminiscing about old times. In the interim day we commuted with Doug into Washington DC and took care of a few shopping errands (replacing a worn apple power cord and trying on sunglasses).

While we were in the city we also saw the new Smithsonian museum; the Museum of African American History and Culture. Like all Smithsonian it would have taken a few days to explore all the exhibits. After visiting the cafeteria for lunch (cornbread-stuffed trout is delicious!) we walked through the history section of the museum. Seeing the artifacts of slavery, particularly an actual auction block where human beings were separated from their families and sold, had a very profound emotional effect on me; which I haven’t felt since seeing the shattered bullet-ridden bones of civil war soldiers at the Mutter museum in Philadelphia. There is something about seeing the artifacts for me that makes history real. Most of the museum visitors were African American, and I kept thinking how they must remember this history, especially the more recent chapters: the civil rights movement and ongoing racism and prejudice. This is still very recent history; their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents likely were touched by this historical struggle making it not just national history, but family history for them. As for me.. well I’m somewhat of a new American – my parents are Canadian (as am I), and I was raised in Egypt, immigrating (if you will) to this country as an adult. How much of this history is mine? Can history every be owned or pinned on anyone anyway?

Our next stop was to visit our college friend John. He lives in a up-and-coming neighborhood on the far eastern side of the DC, sharing a house with two roommates. There was still lots of street culture in the area around where he was living, with raucous block parties and someone cutting up some giant salvaged container in the middle of the night. We passed by the site of a drive-by-shooting, which was being marked similarly to cyclist memorials in Brooklyn, with a shrine. There were quite a few mourners and we stopped for a moment to reflect with them on the life of the person who had died (she was a bystander with three young children). This was right outside a giant new REI. John and his friends were very hospitable. We watched Casablanca, along with an episode of the new Star Wars rebels cartoon, and spoke at length about the military. The military was a big part of the lives of all three members of the household. Two of them work at the pentagon (apparently there are no stairs in the pentagon, only ramps, and there is a cafe in the central courtyard). John himself finished a four-year tour of duty with the Marines recently and is currently working towards a degree in Russian studies.

After two nights with John, we continued onwards on the mount Vernon bike path, which heads into Virginia out of the city. Biking down that path was some of the most pleasant cycling I’ve ever experienced. For those readers who live in the Boston area and have driven down route 2A through Concord, etc during a beautiful time of the year, this was like that, only sized for a bicycle, with excellently spaced curves, stone walls and bridges over streams and swamps, and small trees providing shade.

The path itself extended for 20 miles. I think I understand now why road cyclists enjoy moving through the French countryside at 30 miles per hour.

After a night of camping we made a small detour out to Haymarket, Virginia, to visit our friends Suzanne and Chris. The last time we saw them was at their wedding last year. They recently purchased a beautiful house in a suburban area. Both of their families are from Fairfax county VA (counties are like towns in Massachusetts). We went to a local pumpkin market with an immense variety of pumpkins (warty, smooth, apple-colored-and-shaped, large, small, cannonball, pale blue, and perfectly white), and had a very enjoyable dinner and evening discussing their lives and future plans. We were both impressed with how well decorated their house was; with matching rooms, real furniture, a finished basement! It was amazing!

During the past week it’s been overwhelmingly strange and wonderful to be able to peer into so many lives in such a short time. The next month we should be mostly on our own again, just us and the road, motels, campgrounds, and the occasional Warmshowers host. I’m going to miss the feeling of knocking on a unfamiliar door somewhere and seeing an old friend answer it.

Until next time!

-Jim

Today we biked the distance down the Delaware water gap recreational area. It is a beautiful extent on the Delaware river, filled with former farmland, evacuated via eminent domain in order to build a massive dam. When the impact of the dam became known, however, during the height of the environmental protest movement, the dam was cancelled. The farmers had already been removed, so the land was left to nature.

We biked down from our previous campsite, ‘High point state park’ AKA the highest point in New Jersey, (on the Appalachian trail), and down the land that was to have been flooded by the dam, passing a few ghost towns and preserved farmhouses along the way.

The water gap is also where my love of camping had been rediscovered – on a 3-day Kayak trip with our friend Nic in 2015. Before that my last camping experiences had been in 2008, and calling that camping would be somewhat generous.

There are many things that I have come to love about camping. First is the peacefulness of solitude with nature. I feel like I’m a part of the landscape, and I enjoy passing through various biomes and attempting to recognize plants and geological features as I come across them. I love looking at a map of an area I’ve never seen before, and then actually seeing the land unfold before me later that day. Being on a bicycle makes this easy, due to the increased speed at which one moves over the land, and the extent to which one is made aware of the changes of elevation; if you’re pushing your bike up a 20% grade it’s very very obvious.

Camping is a lot of work, but is enjoyable for the pleasure of living inside a piece of gear origami. I love camping gear – setting it up, tearing it down, sorting it.

The bicycle can carry just enough weight to make it possible to haul, via human power,  a fully equipped camp setup, with camp chairs, laptop, a tiny guitar, two person tent, sleeping bags, mats, etc. One is slightly more tethered to roads than a backpacker, but I haven’t found it to be much of a problem. Usually there are roads where you want to go.

Thanks for reading,

-Jim