The Year of Living Aimlessly.

Riding in the heat is horrendous. All you can do is focus on the never ending, mind numbing, incessant heat. Any slight breeze becomes a philosophical observation. Tiny decisions become of the utmost importance: helmet visor up or down. Jacket opened so you’re like a ballon animal in a wind tunnel, or closed so your body slowly cooks itself. Your lips become cracked and your mouth bone dry. 

And then there’s the feeling of dread that never leaves: “dear god, don’t let me break down here”. The threat of a break down takes on a debilitating sense of foreboding, sucking what little joy you have left straight from your body. And there’s the constant checking of how many miles you have left to go. Thinking, do I have enough gas? Should I slow down? Is that the grim reaper running next to me? It really is like riding through an oven. My all black riding suit, boots and gloves don’t help, I’ve read black garments can add up to 20 degrees to the body temperature, putting my body temperature at sun plus one. All the time I’m constantly scanning the horizon for any hint of shade. Plant a tree every now and again you useless fuckers!

And then a sign for a rest stop, thank god! I pull in and… its closed. I stop anyway and park under the shade of what I can only generously describe as a large branch.  I get out my hydro flask and greedily drink the remaining ice cold water: heaven. I now move on to the water from the water bladder stored on the back of the bike. It’s roasting hot, with a strange metallic after taste. It burns as it goes down my throat. I finish that, even though I don’t want to. I turn on the bike, zip up my jacket and I’m off. The oven door opens, its 108 degrees.

There is a smell emanating from my helmet that could kill a horse from twenty paces. It’s gone through weeks of my profusely sweating head constantly popping in and out of it. It now smells like a ferret had crawled in there, choked on his own vomit and died, but not before in his final moment of life, shitting himself.

I arrive in Roswell in the early afternoon and end up spending the next three nights there, my body in recovery from the previous weeks of riding. My searing skin demanding air conditioning and a bed. I knew riding through the southwest in July would be hot, I mean I’m not a complete idiot, but when you leave San Diego and its 75 degrees, a part of your brain assumes this is what it’s going to be like for the entire journey. This part of the brain is also involved in decision making at 2am on a Saturday night, choice of girlfriends and that daring cowboy-goth period I went through in the late eighties….. its obviously not to be trusted!

Roswell’s claim to fame is the crash landing of an alien space craft in the  nineteen forties. Many people believe it was three female aliens who were flying, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Although to hit a tiny planet in a massive universe, you’d have to be pretty unlucky, or perhaps not paying attention, either way the year was 1947. Ever since then Roswell has really leaned into the whole alien thing. It’s like Disneyland for Trekkies. Gangs of nerds clog the sidewalks, hoping for a sighting of an alien life-form and by alien life-form I mean women, any women…. eventually we grow tired of clogging the sidewalks and go back to our hotels… 

Ironically Roswell has one of the best art museums I’ve ever been to; the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art.

I’ve been on the road now for 18 days and my enthusiasm is dying a slow death, much like the Biden administration (too political?) You can measure your enthusiasm by how early and often you look at the bikes odometer. When you’ve got a three hundred mile day ahead of you and you’re glancing down to check it after twenty miles, you know it’s gonna be a long day. 

Even getting going in the morning is getting harder and harder.  You’d assume leaving early to avoid the heat would be the common sense approach …you’d think. The hotel room sucks you in like a horney vacuum cleaner. This morning I was packing up early in the morning, getting ready to leave. The tv was on in the background, with a movie on. I sit down for one second and before you know it the movies over and the cleaning ladies are knocking on the door wondering if I’m staying another day. Packing up and getting all the luggage on the bike takes at least 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. The worst thing is leaving the cool confines of the hotel foyer and entering into the hot kiln of the outdoors. It’s like a swift kick to the nads. But you know you have no choice. Just like Sophie.

I must say Waco does not promote the Branch Davidians  like I thought they would. 

In case you had forgotten, the Branch Davidians were a religious sect that unfortunately, never fully recovered from some bad press back in the nineties. 

Say what you like about Texas, they have really nice rest areas with a wide range of services. It’s no longer just a place to discard dirty diapers and deceased pets. You can now also pick up prostitutes, weapons and cheap amphetamines, or perhaps find comfort in the arms of a stranger. It’s what makes Texas special, not unlike the curried squirrel meat I was offered.

Riding through the highways and byways of the U.S, you come upon a lot of small, dying towns. Sometimes built around a square or sometimes constructed along a straight road: it’s a long string of soul destroying misery. Derelict, boarded up store fronts, slowly decaying away. The few businesses that are left are praying for a tornado to come through and put them out of their agony. Meanwhile, a couple of miles away down by the freeway, there’s a Walmart, a couple of gas stations and all the fast food your arteries can handle. The price we pay for the sin of convenience. 

I arrived in Lafayette after driving through torrential rain, the worst I’ve seen yet. My high hopes for my waterproof gear was dashed. The only successful item that passed the waterproof test were my boots. They kept all the water in, while letting none of it out. Riding through the rain was brutal, the rain hitting my visor so hard I couldn’t see anything, forcing me to flip it up, which in turn caused a deluge of water to enter the helmet. I should pull off but don’t. I’ll just follow the two red lights in front of me and pray that guys paying attention. Meanwhile you can feel the water seeping into every crevice, every gap of my jacket and pants. My boots are awash with water, sloshing around, from heel to toe. The only good thing is it’s warm rain, at least I hope that’s warm rain. Driving into town the deluge is so heavy the drains back up causing huge, lake like puddles, flooding the streets making riding even harder. I can’t reach the hotel fast enough. 

I arrived at the hotel and waded through the front door to check in at the front desk, leaving a pool of water at my feet. I trudge my way up to my room and open up all my gear and take everything out, laying it around the room. Everything was soaked: my dollar bills, my insurance papers, my passport- all wet. Lucky this hotel has a laundry room, so at least my gear got dry.

August 1st: I have reached the gulf of Mexico, ironically enough inhabited by all white people, but there you go. It took six hours to do 120 miles. My get up and go has really got up and gone. I stopped for a leisurely breakfast, a relaxed lunch and laid back dinner. The light is slipping away from the journey. I pulled into an IHOP for two hours to avoid a biblical downpour

My gear got a soaking again today. The problem becomes trying to dry them. At night the hotel room is too hot to turn off the ac so the clothes don’t fully dry out, which means in the morning you’re having to put on cold, damp gear. Then you pull back the curtain to see its already raining …its going to be a long day! 

New Orleans; known as the Big Easy (which coincidently will be Trumps prison nickname) was a great break. Four nights of great food, drink and music. Although after midnight the city takes on the look of a walking dead set. Drunk, drug addled zombies wander through the streets, it’s like the local jail has thrown open its gates and said “go nuts”.

Rebecca organized a bayou tour on an airboat. The ones that look like somebody’s attached a oversized fan to a large wooden door. The bayous always remind me of the film Deliverance with a hint of Miami Vice. Our tour guide (cue banjos) was straight out of central casting: stumpy, off color with a strange smell; his teeth were not the best. We spent the next two hours racing around the backwaters of Louisiana looking for gators. Anybody caught using the term alligators, well let’s just say they don’t take kindly to those folks, or indeed anybody using the terms orthodontist or shoes.

My philosophy of no freeways, no fast-food is broken. My plan to meander along the coast road is over and has been replaced with “please god make this journey end”. So leaving Pensacola I hop on the I-10 for the most direct and fastest route to Tallahassee I can find. It’s mind numbingly boring and after riding the backroads for the last three weeks, quite stressful and tense. Eighteen wheelers fly by, pushing me around in their turbulent airflow, I have all the control of a drunken toddler trying to skateboard. On top of this its lashing rain.

I arrived in Tallahassee late afternoon with the haunted look of a man who’s been kicked out of a Elton John tribute band for being too flamboyant. It’s been hours of riding. My wrists, ass and knees are killing me: truck stop rent boys have less wear and tear.