clarendon's expired jelly
The following day while riding I noticed that ninth gear wasn’t that difficult, whereas when I first started on the trip it had been hard to pedal even in third gear. After the first week or so, walking feels unnatural and awkward. “Why were we made with these two little sticks coming out of our body?? That’s no way to get around!” I wondered. There’s nothing better, or smoother, than just feeling the road roll beneath your tires with so little effort.
In Clarendon (pop 2,200) six elementary-age kids on tiny bikes tried to keep up with us, and did, but only for a short sprint until they got tired. A couple of high school girls kept driving back and forth past us until Scott finally yelled at them to stop so he could ask them where the grocery store was, and maybe flirt a little. We chatted for a few minutes and he eventually asked about the grocery store. It just so happened that one of their fathers owned the town’s convenience store, so we gave them some money for food and headed out to Clarendon Lake to pitch our tent.
Half an hour later they brought us groceries and three hamburgers. They were Dena Green and Susan Thompson, and we spent the next three hours together until Susan’s mom drove up wondering where she’d been, somewhat worried. Lake Clarendon was nice, not only because there was water (something we haven’t seen much of lately) so we could skip rocks, but looking back I wonder if it was actually a sewage treatment plant because of the shape.
We packed up the next morning and made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the groceries they had brought us. About halfway through the sandwich I noticed that the jelly had expired a couple of years earlier.
Really, though, I had just finished college so it's pretty unlikely that THAT was the grossest thing I'd eaten in the past four years.
We filled up our water bottles before heading out of town. We didn’t collect it from the lake, but still found it to be the worst water of the trip. It tasted like talcum powder and had a white, chalky color to it.
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