Today was epic (for us). It will be hard to describe in writing, but I'll try. After an intense storm with high winds during the night (was that banging bikes flying off the deck?) steaming from Helena to Vicksburg, we woke up to our 6:AM wake-up call, got dressed to ride an went to breakfast, then to the ride talk. The original plan was a 70+ mile option to ride 30 miles from the boat in Vicksburg through the small town of Port Gibson with several sights, to lunch at Mr. D's, 12 miles down the road, then 35 more miles down the Natchez Trace to Natchez and the boat. As usual, there were shorter options involving buses for people and vans for bikes with pick-ups and drop-offs at several spots along the way. For some reason, the first leg became unavailable, so the decision was to bus everybody to Port Gibson and load ALL the bikes onto two trucks and deliver them to Port Gibson. We were happy to ride the bus to Port Gibson (our plan from the start) which we did and then spent an hour and a half exploring the tiny town with a wonderful quilt museum and a working cooperative of women teaching quilting to poor local people for income. Some of that time was sitting on or near the Courthouse steps, waiting for the truck with the bikes. One truck finally arrived. By some strategic parking of our bike before leaving Vicksburg and some luck, our bike was the second-to-last to come off that first truck. The second truck never came. We found out later that the tour staff and four or five volunteer riders had a frantic and chaotic time trying to fit all the remaining bikes into the 2nd truck (Bill had unsuccessfully tried to rent a third on short notice). There were bikes of all sizes this way and that and they apparently considered strapping a couple on the top of the truck. By ingenuity and effort they finally got them all in, but not before Jan had ushered many irate riders into buses to go to lunch, with sworn promises that their bikes would all arrive safely there in time to ride the last leg down the Trace to Natchez.
We, personally, had a lovely ride to lunch with the couple who are our next door stateroom neighbors from Colorado. He is very tall with thighs like tree trunks, she is about a third his size and is still recovering from a year's worth of treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer. See what I mean about intrepid? And, as we found out in Croatia, those Colorado couples just do nothing but climb mountains on their bikes all day. On the way to lunch, Tim and Francine kindly did not drop us.
Lunch was crazy good. Mr. D's is an ancient general store in the middle of nowhere with the walls lined with shelves of everything, presumably for sale, from stacks of vinyl records (not in jackets) to old lamps in various conditions to knick-knacks of all kinds. Jan and Bill found this place years ago and have been fast friends with Mr. D and his grown children ever since. Their claim to fame is the best fried chicken in the country and boy oh boy, they lived up to it!!! Needless to say, any dietary restraint I might have had for the last 6 months went right out the window. Ohmygoodness, it was sooooooooo good! There were also tons of choices like collard greens, yams, ribs, baked chicken, fish, cole slaw, you get the picture. While we were gorging on fried chicken, Mr. D kept coming out of the kitchen to sing to us about his chicken, then his son came out to sing about his daddy. Meanwhile Jan is trying diplomatically to get them back in the kitchen as riders continued to stream in, becaaaaauuuuussssse Mr. D is the only person who fries all that chicken. Apparently, Mr. D doesn't delegate that task for quality control purposes, Whatever his secret, it works!
So as we waddled back to our bikes, other riders were steadily taking off (all the bikes DID make it to Mr. D's). We began our ride down the incredibly beautiful and tranquil Natchez Trace. Our friends Tim and Francine politely tried to stay with us, but it was impossible to match them on hills and when their engine gets going (as for most of those super strong teams) it's hard for them to hold back. No worries. Everyone rides their own ride. The two-lane parkway was smooth and with only an occasional car carefully passing far to our left. It was tandem heaven. EXCEPT that, the grades sneak up on you in rolling terrain like this. Later, we learned that those sneaky grades are called "false flats." They look flat to the eye, but when you look at the bike computer, they are 3% or even 4% grades! We had already ridden 12 miles to lunch, and now we were committed to 36 more. Without going into gory detail, it was a true challenge for us. But we made it and in the end celebrated a personal best :-).
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