May 11, 2006
A dip in the ocean (2)
We're at the foot of the first mountain range, the Appalachians. We could see them, or at any rate the foothills, as we rode through increasingly hillier countryside yesterday,towards Charlottesville. That's where I am now, having a rest day, a welcome one because the beginnings of fatigue are there.
The Pacific still seems a long way ahead. The Atlantic, of course, is familiar. Apart from six hours flying over it to get here, I have spent all my life close to it or one of its associated seas. But the Pacific is unknown. I have never seen it. I imagine it as warm and peopled by millionaires and by swaying bronzed girls in grass skirts. That and strutting beach boys and men with impossibly white teeth whose cars explode as they fall over cliffs.
(It is well known to anybody who watches American television that all American cars explode into a fireball justified only by a helicopter smash the moment they get a slight bump. It is equally clear that there is a free parking space outside every office or shop, that no car in America ever gets dirty and that the country is so full of honest people that nobody locks his car. Just watch. When did you last see someone on American TV lock his car?)
But apparently the Pacific is colder than the Atlantic, which means another misperception squashed.
The first two days weren't special. The ride out of Williamsburg was down a single road lined by trees, which meant something close to tunnel vision all day. And on the second, it rained. It rained all day and it got colder and colder. We're sharing cooking duties and that night I was due to cook with a retired surgeon called Bob (joke: he would deal with the meat and I'd do the vegetables). I fact it got so miserable and there was such a lack of shelter for cooking that we sent out for takeaway pizzas. Hardly the spirit but a lot more practical.
Tomorrow, the first mountains. I gather the Appalachians are harder than the Rockies but shorter. I'm imagining something like the Pyrenees, although never beyond the tree line. We shall see. After that, we are into remoter, more pick-up-and-gas-station America. I will report back from there!
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