Ferry Samaritans and a Mini-Death March

Earlier this week we had a rainy day and so decided to head to Pensacola to visit the impressive Naval Aviation Museum on the grounds of the Naval Air Station there. Men like stuff that flies, especially stuff that shoots and flies, especially in massive quantities (over a hundred planes from the early 1900s to present day) that you can walk right up to and touch. To get to Pensacola we could either drive up to Mobile and take the interstate (booooooo-ring) or take the Mobile Bay Ferry three miles to Fort Morgan and then take the scenic route along the beach to Pensacola (woo hoo!).

The answer here is obvious, and we pulled on to the small ferry at about 9:15 in a cold, windy downpour. As we sat in the warm comfort of our car, we saw a guy with a touring bike standing by the bridge of the ferry trying to get some shelter from the rain. There was no place inside the ferry for the traveling public to get out of the weather, so he was suffering a little. Dad, whose compulsion for safety does not extend to being concerned that random bicycling members of the general public might be ax murderers, offered the backseat of our car for the trip across the bay, and that's how we met Mike, a extremely kind, adventurous, non-ax-murdering gentleman on a solo bicycle trip from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida. Yes, I know, holy cow, that's a long way. More on this in a minute.

As Mike shivered in the back seat, the ferry operator came by and told us that the weather was too dangerous to make the crossing (again, this is a small ferry). This left us with the clear choice of option B, but Mike was a little out of luck because they were probably closing the ferry for the day. Let's consider the geography here. The ferry covers in three miles what would otherwise be a 103 mile trip:

This is why God invented ferries, obviously. Continuing down his path of faith in humanity in general and Mike in particular, Dad invited the soaked biker back to our beach lodgings where we let him use our shower, dry his clothes, and eat some soup and hot chocolate. Mike was thankful and kind and continued to not ax-murder us. He also shared with us a number of the tales that one must collect when riding from the Pacific to the Atlantic alone, including a harrowing account of going downhill at forty-five miles an hour in a construction zone with a line of cars behind him. At night. Yikes. For a detailed run-down of the entire forty-five day trip (nearing its completion), see Mike's blog, which he has been keeping up on quite well despite the often remote locations in which he stops. We're day thirty-eight, but I also recommend days twenty-seven and thirty-five in particular.

So we had a clean biker, a rainy day, and a closed ferry. What to do? We piled Mike and his bike (a Trek 520, sweet ride) in the car and drove him around Mobile Bay. You'll note on the map above that the route turns back West at Gulf Shores to go all the way out to the ferry landing at point B. This was twenty-two miles that Mike could have skipped, but being the conscientious fellow that he is, he had us take him right to where the ferry would have dropped him off. By that time it was mid-afternoon and the rain had given way to sunshine and some serious wind. As he pedaled east down that narrow spit of land, a view of the bay to the left and the Gulf to the right, I think he was pretty psyched. I'll bet coastal biking is a nice change from, say, Central Texas.

So: forty-five days, 3131 miles, all but five days (when a friend joined him) alone. It's the sort of trip that when you hear about it, you can't help but immediately ask yourself whether or not you could do it. I've had a couple of days to think about it, and here's what I think:

Physically, yes, I could manage it. I could get in the kind of shape necessary to do seventy to a hundred miles a day for six or seven weeks straight. Administratively, I could definitely do it. I could manage the mapping and planning and routing and cell-phone coverage and bike repair and problem-solving and crisis escape that has to be done both beforehand and on the fly. Mentally, however, I don't think I'm cut out for that kind of isolation and persistence. That is just a long damn way to ride a bike all by yourself, and making that journey in chunks of two to three percent per day would wear me out no matter how many audiobooks I had on my iPod (For the record, Mike had about two hundred songs on an iPod shuffle and that was it). Round about Dallas I'd be ready to pull a Rosie Ruiz using any means of motorized transport. So Mike, as your trip winds down, take a heck of a lot of pride in what you've done. Your mom may think it was a little bit crazy, but explain to her that it was clearly the amazing and inspiring kind of crazy. Nice work.

As for the rest of the day, the museum was as awesome as expected. For instance, did you know that the F4-U4 Corsair was responsible for shooting down 2,140 Japanese aircraft in World War II, racking up an 11:1 kill ratio? Or that the F-14 Tomcat, the badass fighter of Top Gun fame, went into service way back in 1972? I'll bet you didn't. See? Military aircraft are awesome. For those of you who disagree, I have only one retort: "Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full."

Later in the week we successfully journeyed to the end of Pelican Island-Peninsula without suffering sunburn, dehydration, toe-algae, or seagull bites. It was a mighty walk, and it took just over four hours to complete the ten-mile round trip. Standing at land's end looking back over almost two miles of water at the place where we had started from was quite satisfying, although the smell right at that moment was not. There is a reason for the name, and about a hundred pelicans took off from the tip of the island as we approached, leaving a nose-wounding stench in their wake. I think they'd all had fish for lunch. Nonetheless, the isolation of the journey (not a lot of people venture all the way out there) was pleasing, the views were great, and the beach-walk-writ-large was the perfect way to spend a sunny day.

And tomorrow morning we head back north. I will not, as you can imagine, be waxing so sentimentally poetic about the peaceful joys of driving back to the land of cold rain. But: it was a great week. Hooray for the beach.