Mileage signs are my Achilles’ Heel… (oh and more broken spokes)

Today we made it 57 miles into Oberlin LA! This was a relatively fun ride. The terrain was flat to rolling and there was a shoulder almost all the way. The only place where there wasn’t a shoulder was where a bridge narrowed the road. The Shoulder did, however, have a lot of grass growing through the cracks, but Scott and I decided that we would take grass over chip-&-seal any day of the week.

There must be something about being Louisiana that instantly makes you an alligator hunter. I find myself at every bridge crossing, drainage pipe, or even a puddle looking for an alligator. It’s like once you pass out of Texas by less than a mile and I am looking for/hoping to see an alligator already. 

This is all really exciting, hunting for alligators, and flat roads, but there is one downside and that is mileage markers. I, unlike Scott, do not have a computer on my bike that tells me the distance we have gone. I like to zone out the miles and ride for about an hour and than yell “hey Scott we reach ten miles yet?” and Scott will yell back “12.3 miles” or something like that. I like to under estimate my speed and be so surprised when I find out that we did 12.3 instead of just 10. However Louisiana has mileage markers! So now like Achilles’ heel I have been defeated. I no longer am allowed the victorious feeling of being surprised at how far we have gone, instead I find myself looking at my watch and thinking ‘we’ve only done 1 mile since the last mileage marker.’. This also leads me to constantly be doing mental math. For example, at this maker we have 15 miles left to our goal today, which means, at a 10 mph pace we will be done in a hour and half, which puts us finishing at 2 pm. This doesn’t seem that bad, but I think something similar to this at every mileage marker, which, has kind of taken the fun out of my random guesses and has taken away my ability to completely zone out the distance.

Also as one can tell from the title of this post I have broke another spoke. Scott has been relatively fortunate with his bike, very minor problems, but my bicycle seems to strongly dislike me at this point of the trip. The one good thing about breaking so many spokes (I believe I have broke 7 now) is that I have become and expert at changing them out and putting my wheel back together. Scott however has spokes that have been forged in Hephaestus’ (Vulcan’s) fires, and will not break (besides that one time). If anyone is wondering Hephaestus is the Greek God of blacksmithing (Vulcan is Roman equivalent) and was married to Aphrodite, and yes I took Latin for four years mostly because I liked the stories. 

This ends my Greek myth blog for the day. We are now going to consume teriyaki noodles with tuna, sounds delicious.