Yep, We're in Georgia

January 22, 2016

We wake up to the sound of little rain drops popping off the top of the tent. This makes us nervous. We know that a huge band of showers is on its way and that if we get caught out in it we'll end up soaked to the skin. We pack in record time.

With a steady beat thumping in my head and a tailwind shoving us forward we crank out seven quick miles to Folkston, crossing over the St. Mary's River and into Georgia along the way. Operation Get the Hell Out of Florida was a total success.

We lean the bikes below the covered entryway for a restaurant called the Okefenokee. A Ted Cruz 2016 sign has been taped to the window next to the front door.

"Y'all can grab a seat wheaeveh ya want and someone'll be right with ya," says the waitress.

Crossing that river seems to have made everything more Southern. In the booths around us it's all That watah was twenty-one foot deep and Bout that time and Good to see ya man, evathin' goin' yo way? The eggs and biscuits come with grits. The conversations are loud when groups of people first walk in and sit down for coffee. They get quieter when the food arrives. Then once the plates have been cleared the volume goes back up, points are made with arms and hands raised in the air, and the good jokes make heads roll back with laughter. Hushed tones mean the person is talking about something illegal or saying something racist.

It takes longer than we thought, but by late morning the rain shows up for real, pouring down with such force that we can hear it lashing the roof. We sit inside the restaurant for hours, warm and dry and stuffed. The lunch buffet has been spread out and the parking lot is jammed by the time we walk back out to the bikes.

We head north on the same back roads down which I rode when I came this way in 2011. I keep waiting for familiar landmarks to register in my brain and trigger some spark of a feeling that I had when I passed through here back then. But nothing clicks. I have a great photographic memory for stuff like this, and yet the only things that seem familiar are the things I took pictures of. It makes me realize that if I hadn't taken so much time to create the journal for that trip there's a good chance all but a handful of moments from it would already have been lost forever to the passage of time.

We ride along peaceful back roads among pine tree forests mixed with little swamps. The land is so wet that we're never out of earshot of croaking frogs. The road is so wet from the morning rain that I get splashed with muddy water over the left side of my body from helmet to shoe by the only car that passes us in fifteen minutes. We're in a place of large pickup trucks owned by mustached men who drive with their left hand on the steering wheel and their right propped on the headrest of the passenger seat. It's also a place of dirt roads named after people like Joe Knox and Moncie Johns. A handwritten sign stuck to an ugly picket fence reads, Is there life after death? Trespass here and find out.

We stand in front of the mini-mart that's the start and end of the town of Hickox, eating potato chips and tiny donuts. We watch as a stray dog wanders across the highway and avoids being crushed to death by a car by only a few feet. He lopes away from the road, oblivious, sniffs around the gas pumps for a little, walks over and lets me rub his head for a moment, and then takes a giant piss on the right rear tire of a parked SUV before shuffling off to who knows where. Yep, we're in Georgia.

"Is that a tavern over there?" Kristen asks, pointing to the low yellow building across the road a few minutes later.

"No, that's a clothing store."

Yep, we're in Georgia.

We lose the clouds and rain, but in exchange for the sun we get big winds. When protection of the trees goes away our speed drops to six miles per hour no matter how hard we fight. But soon we end up wishing the wind was our only problem. To avoid the awful U.S. highways around here we routed ourselves on indirect but quieter back roads almost always. What we didn't expect but learn this afternoon is that only a few of them are paved. Where our map shows County Road 48 we find a muddy track lined with deep-treaded tire marks leading out into the woods. It seems like it'll be impassable, but then we see family sedans and school buses driving down there and think, How bad could it be?

The answer: so, so, so bad. It takes twice the effort to travel half as fast. We work and concentrate hard not to dump it in the soft spots. It's like riding on a sponge.

Yep, we're in Georgia.

We have ten miles of this stuff ahead of us. It'll leave us in darkness long before we make it to the state park we're trying to reach. And so we give into the pull of pavement and head north toward U.S. Highway 82. It has the potential for disaster, but it's also listed as Georgia State Bicycle Route 10. We again think to ourselves, How bad could it be?

The answer again: so, so, so bad. We see a wide shoulder when we draw even with the highway. Then we notice that it has a rumble strip running right down the middle. Not ideal – but at least we can ride on the right side of it. And it'll give us some extra protection from passing cars. Then the rumble strip starts to wander, but never toward the traffic lanes, always toward us. This knocks the rideable space down to a foot or less. There's also the constant need to dodge chunks of rubber and metal and thick tree branches. Clumps of grass have grown onto the pavement by the hundreds. At one point we make a last-second swerve to avoid a decaying hawk carcass. And we always have one eye on our mirrors to make sure none of the cars like they're about to sideswipe us at seventy miles per hour. It's a total disaster.

The rumble strips disappear outside of Hoboken. They're replaced with a narrow concrete gutter that slopes away from the highway toward a tall curb. Storm drains with wide openings that slope even steeper away from the road appear every couple hundred feet to add an extra shot of danger to what has become the least-friendly bike-friendly road in America and maybe the world.

We bail south on Highway 15. It's rumble-stripped all to hell but also mostly empty of cars. It feels so much less like we're cheating death. Yet it can only take us so far. Reaching the park means going back to roads covered in soft dirt and sand, where we pass creepy abandoned houses and then mobile homes in such awful states of disrepair you couldn't pay me enough to go inside of them. Every low point beyond the road is filled with standing water. It's like we've gone deep into some weird redneck backwater. But at a sandy, rutted intersection half a mile from anywhere we have to yield to a UPS truck, because even Bubba orders his underwear from Amazon.com now.

The sky goes from dark to very dark to so devoid of light that soon we reach the point where if we turn off our headlights the road in front of us disappears into a flat, depthless black. All the while we crank as hard as we can to go five miles per hour and keep things upright. And instead of calming down as day turns to night the wind grows stronger with sharper gusts.

We're just half a mile from the paved road that will take us to the park when we hear barking dogs charging away from an unlit home. We can't see them in the darkness but as the noise gets louder we know they're almost upon us. We stop and aim our lights to the right half a second before they reach the road. It turns out there are three of them, all some kind of pit bull, skinny and neglected. To them we're the most exciting thing that has ever happened. This means that whenever we start riding they give chase, charging toward our feet and wheels, both excited and dumb enough to run right into them and knock us to the ground if we let them. And so our evening devolves into the two of us walking our bikes through the cold, windy, dark swamplands of Georgia, stopping every five seconds to yell at a pack of semi-feral dogs like we're insane, and trying to ride away but failing, all while our two bicycle headlights flash and dart in all directions like some weird laser light show.

This is our glamorous life.

We wind through a campground lit only by the glow of TV screens inside a dozen fifth-wheel trailers, then do our best to set up a tent that the wind wants to yank out of our hands and fling into the woods. Then we give each other a hug, make dinner, and start in on one of the two-for-five-dollars Dos Equis tallboys we bought back in Hoboken. Soon the tent fills with bad dancing and bad jokes and the sounds of funk songs from the seventies. There are weird bodily noises and incidents involving windproof gloves. More than once we break down laughing to the point that our sides hurt. It shouldn't be this way. We rode ten miles farther than we thought we would, we feel like we rode another thirty on top of that, it's cold, it's windy, and both our lips and asses are chapped. We should by no reasonable measure be so positive and content and happy in a situation like this. And yet that's right where we are.

The wind grows stronger despite the late hour. Then rain starts to fall. The temperature drops lower and lower and lower. We go to bed wearing every piece of clothing that could give us extra warmth: fleece hats, rain pants and jackets, even gloves. It was in the fifties last night, but by morning it'll be in the mid-thirties and the wind will still be howling. What that means for riding tomorrow I don't even want to think about.

Today's ride: 56 miles (90 km)
Total: 100 miles (161 km)

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