May 27, 2006

The sun was still far above the horizon, but - being the savvy outdoorsman that I am - I suspected that it wouldn't stay that way. I had overestimated the strength of my Day Two legs, and underestimated the importance of full-assed route planning. Campgrounds aren't thick on the ground in this part of Virginia, and every decent patch of forest is well-posted with NO TRESSPASSIN' THIS IS MINE ALL MINE BOY I'LL SHOOT YA signs, so I wasn't going to be able to follow Ken Kifer's wise "unfenced and unposted" rule for diving in and setting up a clandestine campsite.

Instead, I followed the advice of the folks at Adventure Cycling: the police are your friends. A friendly State Trooper stopped his car for a couple of minutes to chat about my trike, and then pulled into the driveway of what turned out to be the Sheriff's office of Charles City, VA. I decided to stop in and inquire about places to pitch my tent.

The Sheriff's office was a small room with thick bulletproof glass panels on two sides, behind one of which sat a young dispatcher. She, unfortunately, wasn't familiar enough with the surrounding area to help me out, which I thought was a bit odd, for a police dispatcher. I bought a Coke from the machine that took up most of the room and waited while she tried to summon someone else from the hidden depths of the office, but he hadn't appeared by the time I finished my soda. I thanked the dispatcher and left.

The sky outside had turned dark and threatening, with rumbles of thunder bouncing around the valley. I wanted it to rain - it had been a moisture-sucking 89-degrees for most of the day, with full sun, which is great for solar panels but not so good for pedaling humans. As the first fat drops spattered the fairing, someone ran out of the Sheriff's office to roll up their SUV windows. "Do you need to seek shelter?" she called to me. I said I was OK, thanks, but did she know of a motel, hotel or campground in the area? She said there was a B&B about four miles up the road, and further on, a restaurant that would certainly know more about such places. Very friendly, she was, with the soft accent that you don't hear much in movies because it's not a broad, full-on twangfest.

Ah! At this point, I learned the Lesson Of Planning with even greater depth: the B&B was noted on my map with the little icon man sleeping in an icon bed beneath an icon roof, but not on the GPS. Its phone number was on the back of the map, so I gave them a call on my cell phone. No answer, but no matter - they were on Route 5, which was my road for the next couple of days.

Eventually, I pedaled past the place: it looked inviting and promised showers (which are truly gifts of the gods of Plumbing and Fire)...but there were no cars in the driveway and no answer at the door. So, I brought forth the map once more. No more little icon men sleeping in icon beds beneath icon roofs, and no little icon tents - but wait! There was a little icon tent! It belonged to a church in Glendale, which was quite a bit further along my route...maybe too far. But I called anyway, and left a message on the pastor's machine.

I pedaled onward, reflecting on the virtues of the footloose and fancy-free style of doing things versus the knowing where the hell you're spending the night style of doing things. I decided that if the sun threatened to abandon me, I would have to dive in regardless of signage. Then: the Indian Fields Tavern appeared on my right. The parking lot looked empty at first, but there were a few cars around back, so I dismounted, roughed my sweaty hair into something that I hoped didn't look all homeless and crazy, and went in.

Success! There was another B&B about four miles up the road, the maître d' told me, called Edgewood. So I was off with renewed energy in my legs, looking for a white house on a hill. I found one, after about two miles, not four, and it was the Red Hill B&B, not Edgewood. I didn't care much, so I pulled into the pebbled driveway, walked up to the door, and asked for lodging. They had a room! And the proprietress’s name was Betty Crocker.

I got the pink room, and it was lovely because it had a) a bed b) a shower and c) a ceiling fan. I showered, changed into my unstinky socializin' clothes, and chatted with Betty in the living room over tall glasses of dark brown iced tea. After awhile her husband Emmett came home (she called him "Crocker"), and we talked about my route, his trips out West and, eventually, food. I realized as I was toweling off earlier that I probably shouldn't fire up the camp stove in the pink room, and had resigned myself to Clif bars and whatever dehydrated desert items I could make with unboiled water. Emmett had a better idea: he'd drop me off at the Indian Valley Tavern. Blessed Emmett!

So, we piled into his pickup and I listened to Hank Williams tunes on the XM Satellite radio while Emmett told me about farming. There are roughly twenty farmers in the Charles City area, controlling anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 acres. They grow corn, wheat, oats, and soy...the spring wheat and oats were already in the fields, about 14 inches high and newly green, but the corn was shorter than it ought to be because of the dry April. The rain that spattered me in the Sheriff's office parking lot never developed into a full-blown shower, although it did cut the heat a bit, and the bulk of the storm stayed on the other side of the river.

I saw the maître d' once more, this time a bit more presentable and a lot less sweat-drenched. He apologetically told me they only had seating available on the porch, as though that wasn't exactly where I wanted to sit. I drank my first glass of ice water by pouring it on my head and absorbing it into my skin, and it was quickly refilled by young waitress Jessie, pretty and blonde with a voice and manner that suggested self-esteem issues and, probably, a string of dopey South'ren boyfriends. But she was tending to the other table on the porch; my meal was handled tag-tem by a tall waiter-fellow named Karl and the maître d', who set off my gaydar in a bit of a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil sort of way, only without the Savannahn weirdness.

In the spirit of having finally closed on the house, I ordered an appetizer of smoked Surrey sausages with black-eyed pea relish, and an entree of duck confit over grits with a blackberry sauce and collards prepared Southern-style (that is, with bacon and lots of lemon). There was fresh-baked yellow bread in the basket, and a glass of locally produced straw-colored wine. I hadn't thought to bring my laptop or my paperback, but I was content to sit on the screened-in porch at the end of my first full day of riding, sipping cold wine, looking out across the fields of new wheat, and watching the swallows swoop through the trees.

After dinner I chatted a bit with the maître d' on the porch - he's a transplanted New Yorker, and a few minutes of conversation confirmed my gaydar reading. We talked about my trip and the restaurant's cats - one friendly, with a curiously folded-over ear and a preoccupation with invisible insects, and one unfriendly, that sat under a rocking chair on the porch and glowered balefully at the world.

While I waited for Emmett, I watched more dark clouds gather in the sky, including one cotton-ball cloud that grew swollen, fat and towering as it hit the moist air over the James River, about five miles distant. But, true to Emmett's prediction, the clouds and the needed rain stayed on the other side of it. He has butter and snap beans in his garden that haven't come up yet because it's been so dry, and it looked like it was going to stay that way.

Back at the B&B, he told me about the storms that had come through back in '98 and took down a dozen or more of the trees on the property - cypress, dogwoods, gum trees. That winter, there was an ice storm that took down a couple more, and turned the pine grove across the road into a battlefield, with the creaking and groaning ice echoing like cannonfire.

Later that night I did bathtub laundry, although I'm sure Betty would've let me run a load through their washer if I had asked. I hung the cloths on the shower bar to dry, and was about to open the bathroom window to get some air moving when I saw that the space between the window and the screen was swarming with roughly eight billion different kinds of light-seeking insects. I backed away slowly, and shortly thereafter encountered a half-inch cockroach, staring at me with beady little eyes from the windowsill in the bedroom.

Now, this is not in any way a slight against Betty Crocker's housekeeping - the first thing she did when she showed me the room was bend down and pick a tiny bit of fuzz off the carpet. I've heard of these Southern roaches - travel journalist Joy Williams wrote,

Palmetto bugs, the southern cockroach, are very big, and shiny, too. You'll see them in the best of places as well as in the wilds. At a pool party at an elegant home, a guest was heard to exclaim, "Oh, look at the little turtles!" as a family of these creepies lumbered across the patio. If you crush them, there is a terrible smell of almonds.

I didn't get to smell that terrible smell, though...my movement towards the thing with a wad of tissue caused it to spiral down off the windowsill with an alarming buzz of wings and disappear under the bed. I decided not to worry about it, and soon slept the sleep of Those Who Pedal Much.

The experience was tainted a bit when I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon Wireless this morning being a belligerent customer. They cocked-up my electronic payment and shut off my phone again, which immediately threw me back into the crazed state of Thursday morning that was so much fun for me and everyone else. It's an anger based on fear, I think...fear that they'll never fix it, and that it will end my trip or harm me in some way, which is ridiculous. I ended up leaving Red Hill feeling agitated and petty, which I don't really need in my life. I can't control customer service foul-ups, but I can control how I react to them, so I'll pay a bit more attention to that.

Today's journey: 35 miles to the Holiday Inn Express in Mechanicsville. Until my legs shape up and campgrounds (or campable areas) become more plentiful, I'm probably going to be spending more time sleeping in buildings than in forests.

As Pea e-mailed when I told her about lodging at Betty Crocker's house: nothing wrong with eeeasing into things.