Wanderings and Musings

Saturday, June 21st 2008 - The doldrums have set in as I ride towards Florida. It is hot and humid and I no longer have any particular direction my trip is taking. When I was riding in the west I knew that my destinations were the plentiful and beautiful National Parks, but after New Orleans I don’t have any particular destinations until the Smoky Mountains and Kittyhawk. This is the perils of letting the winds blow you where they may is you don’t know what to expect nor have a place to look forward to. I think I could completely adjust to this wandering travel, but it’s hard to jump straight to it from destination based travel.

To add to my mood, I was thinking I had some Couchsurfing hosts lined up for this area, but in the end they fell through… and a friend of mine wasn’t going to be around either, down in Florida. I knew what lay ahead of me for the night was camping again. Camping is great and all, but I am missing human interaction already.

I’m fascinated by the way our brains work. I can adjust to complete solitude or having constant interaction but it takes a few days to transition between the two. When I switch between them, I feel my brain fighting it and longing for the mode I was previously in. Beginning to understand where the emotions come from and being able to predict them is amazing. Knowing they will diminish after a day or two is also a relief and instead of fighting them I can ride them out, accept them for what they are and continue on.

As I ride along the freeway towards Florida, I can really see how you can miss everything out there when you’re on the freeway. It sequesters you from the countryside. Glimpses in some places, but even then the freeways are often put in less desirable areas so your glimpses are less than exciting.

If you want to get a real clear picture of urban sprawl and the takeover of the strip mall in our life, then Florida should be your main destination. I was amazed that every main road I was on off the freeway, there was strip mall after strip mall. I joked with a few people about how in every strip mall you see the same thing. A nail salon, hair salon, Chinese restaurant, and a gas station out front. No room for the independent stores in the land of the franchises.

Even a completely new stretch of highway that looked like it was less than 6 months old had brand new stripmalls and others in construction. Although I couldn’t see a single house or residential area, just fields and orchards… Where do all the people come from to shop at these stores?

The commercialism was grinding on my psyche and I really wanted to leave Florida. I slept overnight in a National Forest right outside of Tallahassee, then in the morning headed straight north into Georgia.

Through Georgia I left behind the commercialism of Florida and was surprised by a new phenomenon… through all the back country roads there were churches everywhere. I would guess there was one every half mile at one point on this small highway. I couldn’t believe that they had enough members to keep any of them going. In fact it was a Sunday when I was riding along this road, and some churches had a few cars in the parking lot, while others only had one or two. Why so many churches?

Once I got to the east coast through Georgia, I stopped in Savannah and looked around. A nice quiet town, but I wasn’t in the mood to explore much so quickly went on my way.

On the way out of Savannah, I got hit by a tremendous thunderstorm that dumped rain for a good 30 minutes. I suited up into my rain gear under a gas station awning, then headed out into the storm and onto the highway… hoping to pass through it quicker. It only took about 15 miles to get beyond the heavy rain, but it had been raining hard enough that I saw two horrible accidents where cars careened off the road into the trees.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thunderstorm. They were on all sides and closing in… I ended up stopping at a small hotel and bedding down for the night rather than mess with more downpours.

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