23.97 miles @ an average of 10.0mph, 31.6 max
Total ride time of 2:21'11
So, this day started pretty well, but quickly turned to shit. I woke up early and went to a local coffee shop to chat with some friends I hadn't talked to in a while (love you guys, you know who you are). After a few cups of coffee I decided it was time to head out of town, so I packed my phone away and headed north on 23 out of town. A couple miles out I heard something hit my wheel, but didn't think too much about it until a van pulled up next to me and told me I had dropped my phone. I immediately pulled over, parked, and sprinted back to the phone as well as I could in my bike shoes. Unfortunately, there were about six cars behind the van and I think about half of them ran over the phone. By the time I got to it the screen was shattered all over, and only the bottom quarter showed anything at all. I cursed myself out for a while, figuring that somehow I hadn't zipped the phone into the pouch I use to hold it most of the time. So I turned back to town to find a temporary phone to use until I get a new one. Then I took time to activate and charge the new phone. By the time I was leaving town it was about 5PM and the sun was going to set in two hours, while my destination was over twenty miles away and uphill almost the whole way. I headed out without much hope of making camp by nightfall. With this in mind I picked up some whiskey on the way out of town.
On my way to my planned stop, however, I ran across a private campground next to a rafting river which had a great gift shop and cheap camping spots. This was about twenty minutes before sundown, and as you might imagine, since I was in the mountains, it was getting quite chilly and dark already. At the gift shop I went on a bit of a spending spree, something I often do when stressed out, as I was from the phone incident earlier in the day. I finally got some patches to sew onto my panniers, a warm hat to wear at night, a map of the Ozark National Forest, and some food and drinks, including beer. Once I got to the campsite across the road and picked out a good spot with a fire pit I spent a couple hours gathering wood and getting a good blaze going before hanging my hammock and starting dinner, but as the temperature dropped, I was glad I did the tasks in this order. I ended up having a good fire until about 3AM, at which time I put out all but the center mass of coals, which I warmed up by in my skivvies before racing to my sleeping bag for the night.
Day 20
30.16 miles @ an average of 9.6mph, 35.2 max
Total ride time of 3:08'33
I was awoken early in the morning by the roar of Harley Davidson motorcycles. Hundreds of them. I tried to go back to sleep, but slept only fitfully as there were groups of four to twelve motorcycles coming and going from the gift shop all day long. Every time a group would leave, they would all rev their engines to the maximum shout to show all the other bikers that they had massive genitals. This got incredibly irritating after a while, so I finally rolled out of my hammock and got some water boiling for oatmeal and hot chocolate. Breakfast of champions. Because I hadn't slept well (due to the fact that my feet kept freezing during the night, and then the early motorcyclists), I lazed about quite a bit and finally got packed up around 2PM, and then lazed about some more. I didn't leave the site until after 3PM. This, as I later discovered, was a terrible plan.
My ride for the day started with an 8 mile climb. Seriously. Eight strenuous miles of switchbacks and straight climbs with Harleys roaring by, deafening me with their penile-enhancement engines. Hundreds and hundreds of weekend warriors flying by on a three day escape from corporate enslavement. I don't think a single one of them was not a middle-aged person in middle management. After this weekend, I will forever associate HD's with mid-life crises. Anyway, I finally reached the summit of my climb, and was treated to a few miles of downhill, although I'm pretty sure I didn't descend more than half of what I climbed that day. After a few miles I turned toward Fayetteville where the nearest Sprint store was to get my phone replaced. Unfortunately, by this time the sun was quickly setting and the temperature rapidly dropping. I began to stop every few miles to don another set of warm clothing, and when I got to Crosses, AR I stopped at a gas station to ask about nearby lodgings. There were none. They had a diner inside, however, so I ate some greasy food and decided that I should keep an eye on the parking lot to see if anyone with a pickup truck with a decently-empty bed pulled up so I might ask them for a ride to Fayetteville in exchange for some gas money. One woman suggested I just hike down to the river and camp by that, but I wanted warmth, and I didn't think that setting a fire in the middle of the wilderness without a fire pit was such a good idea for multiple reasons. After a while, a couple of guys in a Toyota Tacoma pulled up to eat in the diner and I asked them if they would help me out, but the driver said he wasn't headed in that direction. No other trucks arrived within half an hour.
Feeling defeated, I remounted my bike and headed for Fayetteville again, cold, miserable, and looking forward to 22 more miles of this feeling. After about two miles, however, I saw the Tacoma pass by, and I thought to myself "Thought they weren't headed that way, bastards." After a minute, however, I saw the same truck headed back in the opposite direction. Ahead of me they turned into a gravel drive and stopped. The driver climbed out and called out to me, "Still want that ride?" "Fuck yes," I said, breathlessly, as they had stopped near the top of a large hill. They helped me get the bike in the bed, and I climbed in the back. They said something about it not being too comfortable back there, but I wasn't exactly in a position to complain.
I haven't gone that fast in weeks. It felt like we flew to Fayetteville, and on the way they asked if I knew where I was going to stay once I got there. I admitted that I didn't know, and they told me that all the hotels in the city were booked up and had been for months due to the fact that a large motorcycle rally was going on in the city that weekend. This explained the inordinate number of HD's I had seen on the road that day. Still, I was non-plussed, there must be somewhere in the city that wasn't completely booked. I asked them to drop me off at a coffee shop or somewhere else I might have access to wi-fi so I could look for a place to rest my bones. They obliged, and soon I was sitting at Hastings scouring the web for an open hotel room. I never did get their names, but I'm forever grateful to them anyway.
They were, however, correct about the state of hotel rooms in the city. The first five places I called were all booked up, and the sixth had two rooms available. For $179 per night. Plus tax. The hotel attendant assured me that this was a good deal as their normal rate was $249 per night. I told her I would call back if I couldn't find anywhere cheaper. There weren't any in Fayetteville. North of the city is another city, Springdale, AR, and I started searching there for hotel rooms, and finally found one for $89 after taxes. It was 7 miles away from Hastings. I'll pedal 7 miles at night in the cold for a chance to save a hundred bucks. I got there before 10:30 and was asleep not long after that.
Day 21
13.57 miles @ an average of 12.0mph, 32.9 max
Total ride time of 1:07'49
I woke up with the idea that I would get my phone fixed and head out of town. Never plan ahead. I got some breakfast (complimentary!) and checked out by 11:30AM, and was using the Internet access in the lobby when I noticed a guy taking huge stacks of money out of the gambling machines lined against the wall before the front desk. "What do people win from those machines?" I asked him. "Room credits," he replied. This started a conversation which led to me telling him about my travels and adventures, and he was impressed. Impressed enough that he bought me a room for the night. "Rest your legs for another night on me, man." His name was Herman. I haven't seen him since, but I'll remember him.
I unpacked my bags into the new room and, unloaded for the first time in a long while, headed to the Sprint store to fix my problem. Which led to more problems. Apparently Sprint workers are not even allowed to touch a phone if it is as damaged as mine is. All replacements and insurance claims are handled through a third party. Why? I don't think I'll ever know. It probably has something to do with them sending you faulty equipment in return for your broken equipment and Sprint not being culpable for that. Maybe I'm just jaded... Anyway, I spent most of my pre-paid minutes trying to get the people from that company to replace my phone, ended up having to call my dad to call them because they said that the security key I told them was incorrect, when in fact it was correct, and then I had to call them back again to get them to ship the phone to the Sprint store, which meant they had to speak to a manager to get him to say that they would accept the phone for me, which meant spending more of my valuable minutes, which meant that after a few hours at the Sprint store I was fed up and needing feeding. And my phone wouldn't be delivered until Tuesday. Stuck in town. Thank Herman for the free hotel room for the night!
So, I headed back to my room and stopped for some Thai food on the way. It was delicious. I got back to my room, ate, and searched the Internet for a bar. I found one a short distance from my hotel and went there for a couple of beers and some games of pool. I was one of three people there. It closed after 45 minutes.
So I went back to the hotel and read for a while until I finally fell asleep, tired and wanting to get out of the city, but knowing I would have at least one more day here.
Day 22
18.63 miles @ an average of 12.5mph, 30.4 max
Total ride time of 1:28'57
Because I'm stuck in an urban area, I decided to do what I would do in any urban area. I found a coffee shop. First, though, I found a Bank of America to cash a couple checks I had from graduation presents I still hadn't cashed in on. Then I went to a bike shop and got my chain re-lubed, which it needed after being outside so many days and through so many rainstorms. There I also purchased a pair of cold weather riding gloves for the mountains and the coming month as autumn approaches. These were both next to the University of Arkansas, so I decided to check out their campus. It's not as pretty as Texas State's, but I may be a bit prejudiced. Still, it reminded me a lot of San Marcos with rolling hills and lots of young people. The people didn't seem as friendly as Texans, though. I saw a group of people with ENO hammocks like mine all hanging out in a tree (pun intended) and I thought they might be working with ENO trying to sell hammocks. I went over to them to try to strike up a conversation, asking their affiliation with ENO, which they said they weren't, they just liked them, and I told them I'd been living in one of the hammocks for about two months. They didn't say anything, just kept to themselves. So I wandered away, failed to meet more people, checked out some bikes, found them to be mostly blue in color, and then headed to a nearby coffee shop. Where I failed to meet anyone, but had a few cups of coffee which were better than Starbucks, but still lacking when I think of the coffee in San Marcos. So, I pedaled back towards my hotel, 8 miles away, and stopped by the bar I visited the previous night about a mile from my hotel. There were actually people there, and one of the pool tables was open, so I started playing by myself and a guy walked up and plunked some change on the table. Glad to have an opponent, I finished off what balls I had left on the table and started playing him. We played for a few hours. He was good. I would say he was about my skill level, probably a bit better, which made playing fun. After he beat another guy out of $10 he started buying my beers, and we started playing for fun, first playing "next shot" and then we played a game where I played one-handed, while he played behind-the-back. I won both, and he insisted we go back to regular pool. After a while, and quite a few beers, I was famished and tired, so I took my leave of the bar, returned to my temporary home, and started some laundry while I waited for Domino's to deliver me a pizza. Both are finished now, and with that, so is this blog post.
Oh yeah, passed the 500 mile mark for my journey today. Looking forward to the next 500!
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