[ Irish KC ]
Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

North: Beginning The 2nd Half

Part 42 of the Cycle-Across-America series. (Read from the start in Boston or see the full index)

It is time to leave the rest that has been Kansas City, and carry on towards the west coast. Via Iowa. Time to cycle north so.

Barely got the energy to talk at this stage. Or the inclination.

Where are we? It’s Tuesday the 24th of September. The first day back on the bike after Kansas City, Missouri. Was meant to be back on the bike yesterday and that’s what I’d built up.

I’d been preparing ’til 4.30 in the morning, then went to sleep on the couch, got up about 6.30 to the sound of rolling thunder and lightning all around. And this just went on until lunchtime. So I called it off. There was no point in going out in that.

Oh jeepers, I’m so tired. From drinking all the time. Staying up late, talking constantly. Out again last night. As somebody said,
- if emptying people’s fridges of beer was an Olympic sport…

Last night I was taken to a Chinese place. It was a buffet so I tried lots of things. Then I remembered I should be eating lots of carbohydrates as I was definitely going off this morning and I knew the weather was going to be good.

Yesterday I also rang home. Mam told me she got a letter from the woman in the Post Office in Hepler, and a clipping of a newspaper article about me. She read it out. It sounded well put together without boring people with statistics. My response of “your whole country is out of my way” was in print. Dad said it sounded like me - so it’s good to see I still sound the same.

[I’ll put the rest of this entry below the fold]

Today was a very, very odd day. Highs and lows, and emotions and stuff. Comparable to the first day back on the bike after the crash when I was a lot …nervous, to put it mildly. It was just so hard to leave I’d had such a good time. And it wasn’t getting easier with every day. I had nowhere to stay tonight because my contact in St Joe, was unfortunately leaving this afternoon.

She suggested anyway that she comes back from business on Thursday but that’s another two days and anyway the rains are heavy rains on Thursday and there’s probably quite a bit of rain tomorrow and quite a bit of rain on Friday so I’d end up staying there forever. So it was time to go even though I really didn’t want to. It was very hard to.

So at the start of the day I was shaking my host’s hand and giving him a hug. That was that. He smells like he wears Aveda products. And then I pottered around very slowly, trying to pack my bags into my bags - plastic bags into the panniers.

I’m still a bit funny in terms of - well I’ve had a few more nervous trips to the bathroom. And I wasn’t hungry. It took ages and to repair a puncture. I had to replace the tube - the damaged tube - which was the remaining thorn proof one. See if I could see where it was burst. I could alright. You had a 4 inch straight long gash as if it’d been slashed with a razor blade. Checked the tyre out and the tyre looks fine so I don’t know what happened - it’s in the bin and it puzzled me to hell and then I said there’s no point in thinking about it.

I peddal off for the first time in well, two weeks exactly. As I was cycling out from the house the chain came off. Minutes later I was covered in oil. Things weren’t going great.

Stopped at more friends a mile and a half up the road. Checked e-mail one last time before some Special K with two big mugs of tea. Then I remembered I had forgot me tea-bags, the ones that had come all the way from Dublin, that had survived the rain at the start in Boston and the crash in Virginia.

Strange cycling in a city you’re familiar with. Unlike most days where everything you are seeing is for the first time. By the time I rached the Plaza, only a mile on, I just wanted to be out of the city. But I still had the Missouri river to negotiate.

Using Broadway and Main I rolled on downtown. I was aiming for the Broadway Bridge.

2 weeks I’d had to research a safe way for a bicycle to cross the Missouri River, and I’d done nothing except half-heartedly ask a couple of car-drivers late one night when emptying their fridge. They answered like car drivers.

The Broadway Bridge slopes down as you cross from the downtown side to the northern side. The traffic coming onto it includes traffic coming from 2 interstates. It has no shoulder. And it has those big shores which are grids parallel with your wheel almost perfectly designed to trap bicycles. In other words a bicycle has no business being on that bridge.

I have barely started across it when I realise this is madness, this is lethal. I want to go back, but with no shoulder and the slope that’s impossible. Traffic is very close to me. At 70mph and more. And there’s a drain about to trap my wheel and throw me off.

I angle the front wheel and try to turn the whole bike in the few inches of space I have, just enough so that neither wheel will drop into the grid, and without hitting the edge of the bridge or without going under the cars and trucks that are screaming by me, some of them beeping.

It all goes so fast. I make it across still getting beeped at but alive and looking for safety somewhere. A shoulder appears. I breathe a big sigh while feeling embrassed and stupid for putting myself in this situation.

After a couple of hundred yards the shoulder ends abruptly. The road is all but an interstate - because it links an interstate to an interstate. The traffic is too fast in both directions and no median - just a barrier. Still I contemplate trying to somehow get to the other side of the road so I can go back. Even if that was possible though I’d now be going up the slope and wouldn’t have the necessary speed to help me avoid being trapped by those drains.

I decide to brave carrying on. There is a white line painted at the edge of the road so technically there is maybe 6 inches of a shoulder. Traffic is very fast and very close. It seems like everything is beeping at me. I jump off the bike onto the bank and drag the bike off the road to. I make my way back to where the shoulder stopped.

Because of construction the safe option of making it onto the small roads that go around the downtown airport are inacessible. I spend an hour trapped on that island of safety trying to think of a way out. Towering over me is downtown Kansas City with friends in offices thinking I am miles away to the north.

I drag the bike up the bank fighting through bushes. I get cut from the bushes. There is a railway track up there. I have carried my bike across tracks before; it’s not a problem despite the extra weight on the bike but then I see that there is construction on the railway also.

A entire track is dug up. I am faced with a 6 foot deep pit blocking my way out. All the time I keep looking up at downtown Kansas City and get embarassed. I spend an hour in this obstacle course, lifting, carrying, and dragging until finally there is asphalt and I can cycle. But I can’t.

I have a flat tyre. I have a very flat tyre. I have one of the flattest tyres you could ever have. There are 24 thorns stuck in my rear tyre. I sit down on the dirt and look over my shoulder at downtown Kansas City knowing how near but inaccessible comfort and tea is.

Why am I doing this?

After binning the slashed tyre in the morning I have no spares so this tube of a thousand holes must be fixed. With strategic placement I use 8 patches, and pump the wheel a million times. Another 2 hours has passed.

Bleeding and devoid of any back ups I cycle into North Kansas City with no idea where I’m going. It is too close to downtown, too built up, for my map to be of any use. Nervous of being sucked back onto a big highway I deliberately go the wrong direction and choose residential streets where I see them. But.

I hit dead end after dead end. 3 times I end up in neighbourhoods that I can’t find any way north out of, save for climbing a fence, so I have to come back out. I spend hours going nowhere and going everywhere.

Eventually I am free, I am rural. But is getting dark. St Joseph is so close to Kansas City but I’m not going to make it. Safely finally I am far enough away from KC that I can work my way west and across the interstate. Just. There is a truck rest.

I see no office so I walk towards the shop and ask a trucker if this place does rooms to stay in. He wears a confused look before answering with a pronounced twang,
-If you want to get by in this country then you’re going to need to learn the language.

It’s been a bad day and now I’ve being told I need to learn English. I want to assault him. While I wonder how wrong it might be to beat somebody up because they couldn’t understand your accent, he opens the shop door, turns around and says,
-if you were asking if this place does rooms you can book them inside here.

He doesn’t know how close to being a murder victim he was.

So I’m exhausted, and yet I’ve only progressed a few miles. But I am at least away from Kansas City and friends, so I guess tomorrow it really does start again. Properly.

Read the Next Entry in My Bicycle Trip Across America

Read more from my Cycle Across America

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 4:27 am and is filed under 1-eolai, Cycle Across America. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.