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Part 17 of the Cycle-Across-America series relayed day by day, exactly ten years after it happened. (Read from the start in Boston)

Ten years ago today I was struggling to regain enjoyment of the trip, and about to meet up with a Dublin cousin:

Sunday the 18th. Turned Half six in the evening. At a soccer complex in Fayetteville.

There’s a group of people over there playing soccer at the moment, training, running around, heading the ball. I did 85 miles today from Goldsboro. My map is in tatters like me.

The lack of traffic today was good. I’m enjoying North Carolina. Typically there’s just a lot of swamps, a lot of trees. A lot of trees with foliage only at the top, and then the bottom bits are barren and a lot of them have been pushed over by various winds, uprooted or broken.

Swamps everywhere, lots of little bridges with weight limits. On a small road you could have 3, 4 bridges in a row, in a 200-metre stretch. And they’ll all have different weight limits on them. The limits could be from 14 tons to 28 tons for a single vehicle, and more again if you’re one with a trailer.

Again, tons of tobacco today. Cotton and peanuts and corn. Loads of it. A lot of the wildflower, and just thick growth, all sorts of stuff. It’s got a rugged feel to it, North Carolina. The trees today, although there was a lot, were nothing like the first day up in the North Eastern section where they were just huge and you felt like they owned the place and humans just borrowed a little bit to get through it.

When it was thundering I was trying to get off the busy road. I could see some maps at this garage shop so I went in, threw out a spiel at the bloke about secondary roads and maps. He’s looking at me until I finish, and he says,
–I have not got a clue what on earth you are talking about.
So I apologised and explained very slowly and tried to slow down.
–You speak too fast man! Where are you from?

Today at lunch in a Hardees, this fella, I couldn’t understand what he was saying at all and it wasn’t the Southern accent. He had a speech problem. Nobody could understand him, but in the end I stopped saying I’m sorry and realised that whatever he’s talking about he was asking me questions. He was gesturing at my bike outside the window, and so I proceeded to answer questions I guessed he might be asking me, but I honestly didn’t understand a single word he said.

At breakfast I had a Hot Tea in a McDonalds again today. They had to have a committee meeting about the hot tea, even though it was up on the menu. It took them ages to come together and get someone who could arrange to make it and then give it to me.

People chatted to me today. Again nearly all black people. Asking me about this and that. What I’d done, where I’m going. That kind of stuff.

One thing about North Carolina is they have these great big wooden sheds. They’re totally square at the bottom and rectangular oblongs as they go up, maybe with a corrugated roof or a wooden roof, rotten.

A lot of houses are like that as well out here, but one thing is –and maybe they’ve been painted, maybe they haven’t been, and if they have been painted they’ve certainly faded. But they have trees and bushes growing around them, up the outside of them, inside them out, and they seem to be kind of tended to.

Certainly the crops around them are squared off. Maybe the grass around them is tended to very closely. So these things are like monuments or extremely elaborate flowerpots. I think they’re fabulous. Tons of them yesterday particularly.

I used my mirror extensively today. I didn’t turn around so much. I actually looked behind me physically twice or three times today. Yesterday I did it hundreds and hundreds of times and I stopped, pulled over, over a hundred times.

There was a hawk which flew out of the bushes today. Some dead big birds beside it. I don’t know what they were. Perhaps they were Turkeys or Vultures–they were white.

I passed an Ostrich farm, which was good fun. There seemed to be 2 to a pen. There was only about a dozen of them.

Yeah while I think of it, reading the Sunday papers this morning, the North Carolina section. There was a sheriff in a county who, inspired by the Grand Canyon recently, the colours of it and how it made him feel, has painted, 2 or 3 of his cells, in the jail pink. He got the inmates or who was ever there, to paint it pink. And then he got his sergeant to, using a stencil, to put blue Teddy Bears all over it.

He reckons it’s hard for them to get aggressive when it’s like that. There was a lawyer who said it might be sickening but it’s probably not against the Constitutional rights. He’d checked it out. This was allowable.

It’s hard to visualise me getting to Kansas City at all at the moment. I’m in a lot of pain. My head’s still messed up.

I’ve been trying to put it into percentage terms the enjoying of the trip. Prior to being knocked down I enjoyed 100%. Every day. No matter what was going on. 100% enjoyment. Including days like New York to Philadelphia which were all built up and yukky and you’ve loads of concerns about the traffic, and they always existed, and some scary moments. I still enjoyed it 100%.

First day back after the accident, that day trying to get back to Virginia Beach when I didn’t make it, I reckoned 5% enjoyment.

And the next day it went up a lot. When the shoulder got a bit wider and I got more comfortable turning around looking backwards trying to make eye contact with every single driver. And then ultimately when I stopped at the B&B. So I’d say about 40% that day.

But yesterday picked up a bit more. The motel was good. The swimming was good for the leg I think. I certainly felt a lot better last night than I did the previous night.

My average speed today was down to 11.6. Really it should be up over the 12 to be honest. It makes a big difference. Five hours of 10 is fifty. Which to look at one day, it would be an extra 15 miles, doing that average speed. Which is the difference between a 75 and a 90. It’s substantial, particularly if I’m going to lose daylight when it does get clouding over.

When traffic is coming up your bum, not moving over, you just pull into the shore and half fall over. Unfortunately I was forced off the road before that where I went into thick heavy sand muck stuff, which made a mess of the bike

So today I would say 80%. I still need to look in that mirror. I need to know what’s coming up behind me. Every single thing.

When they just make that noise as they go past, I’m right back there, right back in the crash when it’s going through me and I’m going flying, and it’s very hard to cycle, in those circumstances.

Looking at the map for tomorrow, getting out of here is going to be a mess. I don’t know where I’m aiming for. Cheraw or Bennettsville, which were options I had down, look actually too near, which is probably a good thing because I think Colombia the next day is 106. I don’t want to go to Columbia anymore.

I don’t want to go to these places, because it’s such a hassle getting into them. For miles out you get these big roads which are just dangerous, and then when you get into them it’s very hard to find the centre.

I don’t care about the centre of Fayetteville anymore. I want to keep this even Smaller-town. I don’t care. I’m not interested in built-up areas any more. If I can stay out and about – great. I need a better map of South Carolina. And perhaps of Georgia.

Read the Next Entry in My Bicycle Trip Across America

Read from the beginning of the Cycle Across America

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Cycle Across America. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.