"East Bank" - August 18th, 2007 by Taylor Lasseigne |
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This is a story about a cycling trip that follows every curve of the Mississippi River's east bank, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, LA. On this self-propelled two-wheel adventure, the clock started at 5:40 AM when my feet left the ground and found the pedals of my Trek bicycle. The idea for the trip however, was realized much earlier.
A few years ago, I found myself living in Philadelphia and feeling guilty about all of the things I had taken for granted in Louisiana. Realizing what I had, now that it was gone, I began to formulate grand excursions with New Orleans as the home base. My Holy Grail, the trip that I loved to sit and daydream about, was a cycling trip from New Orleans to Biloxi, MS, ending in a night of camping on the beach. Another trip put me cycling from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on River Road along the Mississippi River. Another trip on my back-burner had me paddling and camping through the swamps of Southeastern Louisiana. Over time, these festering plans began to germinate and were truly fertilized, as I was exposed to hiking, climbing, cycling, and paddling for the very first time in and around Philadelphia. We fast-forward a few years to when Hurricane Katrina comes ashore, uninvited, to rearrange most of the Gulf South. She moved cars, trees, homes, businesses, bridges, and roads - including mammoth chunks of the road from New Orleans to Biloxi, obliterating any chance of me biking that route any time in the near future. With this crushing blow came that "don't know what you have until it's gone" feeling again. After two months away from the city, we came back, shimmied our rancid fridge to the curb, and started to make a go at it - not that we even had floodwater in the house we were renting, but by simply deciding to remain in New Orleans, we were basically agreeing to climb uphill for an indefinite amount of time. The trip to Biloxi was a wash - out of the question for at least a few years. My eyes were opened to the fragility of nature, and I began to plot my next move with haste, in hopes that I could complete the voyage before Mother Nature struck again. I would bike from New Orleans to Baton Rouge along the river levee, taking in all of the sites along the way. Let us fast-forward a few more years. For my 28th birthday, my wife rallied a bunch of my friends to pitch in on a bike for me. I got a Trek Hybrid, a real traveling cyclists bike capable of long road trips and strong enough to tolerate the pot marked streets of New Orleans - top of the line parts made in the USA. Now I had the right bike for the job, but when was I going to take this trip? I started to crunch the numbers, began plotting points on maps, and I slowly began to realize the weight of this gut-check. The trip was about 130 miles, which I figured by plotting the distance in my Google Earth software approximately eight times. Each mapping of the route in Google Earth took approximately three hours, so the distance I came up with, 130 miles, is the average yielded by approximately 24 hours of tedious, late-night clicking and dragging - lots and lots of clicking and dragging. I now had to calculate potential trip duration. Here's what I knew: (1) I would want to stop frequently for hydrating, eating, and photography (2) Daylight was limited (3) I can average about 14 mph whilst carrying a load of supplies, with the wind at my back. A little more math told me that if I biked 130 miles non-stop at about 13 mph, then the trip would take about 10 hours. Well, I knew I wasn't going to go without stopping, so I added 2 hours of time for eating, resting, and another hour for taking in the scenery. This alteration left me facing a 13 to 14 hour day on a bicycle in the unreasonable, remorseless August heat of Southern Louisiana. One might ask, "Why take this trip in the summer?" Well, I knew that I would need at least 12 hours for the trip but probably more like 14, so I had to take advantage of our hemisphere's longest days. A scheduled vacation to the Pacific Northwest and a summer job as a tugboat deckhand in the beginning of the summer ruled out those relatively cooler months. If I didn't seize my chance in mid August, then my schedule would soon be consumed by my teaching gig, which started on August 20th. The trip would take a backseat to my first real full time teaching job and possibly fade away into adventure purgatory. The forecast for August 18th was suitable for a long ride - wind mostly to my back and some cloud cover. Unfortunately, the forecast also predicted a very intense heat advisory for the hottest part of the day. I liked my chances, so I packed up, printed and laminated maps, and got as much sleep as a man can on the eve of such an exciting endeavor. |
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