Tappahannock

My healing butt is telling me the riding is getting easier. We're at sea level now, and there aren't really any hills left in this floodplain they call eastern Virginia. We ride along at 16-18mph for a couple of hours, then arrive at a stop and take a rest and get a drink. Music makes the time go faster, but as they say, time flies when you're having fun. It's hot, actually reached 96 today, but with a breeze and a tailwind, the riding today was marvelous. The worst part was the breathtaking garbage trucks that passed us non-stop, heading for the dump. They took your breath because you were afraid to breathe the smell for about 20 seconds. But there was actually a shoulder!! As the trip winds down, I can tell we've put a lot of ourselves into it. There's a kind of " what do I do now" feeling after something this involved. Today we rode 50 miles to Tappahannock, Va. from Ashland. Tappahannock is an Indian word meaning "the rise and fall of water". I kept thinking about other classic journeys, not much more famous than ours.

Marco Polo, who was a Venetian, traveled the Silk Road to China from Venice from 1271-1295. If this trip took that long I would be 80 years old when I got back to Denver. Ferdinand Magellan started on a voyage in 1519 intending to sail around the world. He ended up getting killed in the Philippines, but one of his five ships made it back, with 17 of the original 270 crewmen still alive. They had to eat the leather straps from the rigging to stay alive. We're sick of the fried leather we've been eating also. Columbus took just one year for his voyage, from 1492-1493. He brought a few things back to Europe when he returned, including tobacco, pineapples, turkeys, hammocks, and syphilis. Thomas Cook, Captain Cook himself, left England in 1768 and returned in 1771. He knew enough to take citrus and sauerkraut along to prevent scurvy. We forgot to bring those things in our yellow box, so may end up with scurvy ourselves. My gums are starting to get sore. Then there was Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed in a homemade balsa wood boat from Peru to the Polynesian Islands. It took him 101 days, about the same as us, and he traveled 4300 miles, very close our distance. Does this mean the ocean waters move along as fast as we can pedal? The Race Across America riders cross the country in 8 days, and if you don't finish in 12 you are stopped and get a DNF. This makes us look pretty weak. You have to average 250 miles every day for 12 days, almost 400 per day to be among the early finishers.

We're at sea level now, on the Rappahannock river. I will come up with a summary list of goods and bads tomorrow if we can get internet. We are staying in some cabins on the Chesapeake Bay so we can catch a ferry across the water for Maryland. They may be rather primitive. All this water reminds me of Ishmael's journey on the Pequod looking for Moby Dick. That was quite a journey also. At one point the crew kills a sperm whale and dismembers it. This process involves the harvesting of spermaceti, a mysterious fluid found on the head of a sperm whale and a key ingredient of cosmetics. Ishmael's account is memorable. " Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my colaborer's hand's in it , mistaking their hands for the gentle globules."

We will look for Moby Dick tomorrow in the Chesapeake, but if we find him I'm not going to squeeze any sperm.