My Commencement into Retirement: The Great Mississippi River Ride
by Bob Fronk
I decided that I wanted to begin retirement with a special event. So I signed up for a 1748-mile bicycle ride from New Orleans to Minneapolis that started one week after Spring Commencement. I figured retiring after a commencement ceremony was appropriate – I would start a new part of my life along with all our graduating students.
The trip was with 30 other cyclists from all over the country. We were the class-of-2007 riders for the “Great Mississippi River Ride,” a trip organized by America by Bicycle (AbBike). The company runs fully supported cycling trips up and down the U.S. and coast to coast across the country. This type of “supported” ride includes daily luggage transportation in vans and nights in motels and hotels. Breakfast and dinner every day is also part of the package. Supported trips allow you to carry on your bike only what you need for the day.
The longest rides I had done before were seven-day trips usually going a bit over 400 miles. The GMRR would be 1748 miles in 25 days. I started training at the beginning of the Spring semester. I needed to get my weekly mileage to over 200 miles, with Saturday and Sunday rides of 75 miles each. On the GMRR, I would be riding an average of 70 miles every day. Distance was one concern. The other was hills. The average daily climbing on GMRR was just over 2000 feet: 50,000 feet of climbing for the whole trip. The hilliest days had over 4000 feet of climbing. Needless to say, Melbourne is not the greatest place to train for that kind of terrain. I determined that the biggest “hills” that we have are the Intracoastal Waterway causeways. So part of every Sunday’s ride included 14 trips over the Melbourne Causeway. I got to know the Melbourne Causeway much better than I ever cared to.
But ready or not, the day came to put my bike into the rental car and drive to New Orleans. I ride a recumbent bike. On recumbent bikes you sit on a seat with a back and pedal with your feet out in front. Most health clubs these days have recumbent style stationary bikes available for members. My recumbent is a long wheel base design that I had made with an extra long frame – it’s nearly eight feet long from fender to fender. Fortunately, the rear seat of the rental car folded down so I managed to get all eight feet into the trunk and rear seat.
The GMMR was organized into three segments: New Orleans to Memphis, Memphis to St. Louis, and St. Louis to Minneapolis. Since my brother lives in Minneapolis, the plan was to ride to his house at the end of the trip. We would then have UPS ship the bike to Melbourne and I would fly home. It almost worked out that way.
New Orleans to Memphis: Days 1 - 8
Although we all started riding each day at about the same time, after breakfast and loading our luggage, much of the time was spent riding alone or in small groups of two or three. A few of the folks came together and rode together, but most of us would periodically pass one another as the day progressed. We would then arrive at our motel or hotel at varying times throughout the afternoon, depending on our speed and sightseeing stops. The AbBike vans (two on them, one pulling a trailer with our luggage) roamed the route during the day and set up rest stops about every 30 miles with snacks and water. The staff included a bike mechanic and three others. They did a remarkable job of keeping track of all 31 of us spread out over many miles of road. Most of the riders had cell phones which allowed communication with the vans whenever cellular towers were nearby.
Riders on trips like this are typically limited to two pieces of luggage totaling no more than 50 pounds. Most folks take two or three sets of riding cloths and wash them every night or every other night. I did the former, in the sink of my room. By morning, my clothes were dry and ready to put on or pack.
The first eight miles of the Great Mississippi River Ride was on top of the Mississippi River levee. The cap of the levee was paved for use by walkers and cyclists. The river was on the left, filled with tankers and huge cargo ships. Refineries and an occasional restored plantation house were on the right. Once off the levee, the countryside shifted from refineries to fields of sugar cane. This part of Louisiana was flat like Florida.
It took us three days to get from New Orleans to Natchez, Mississippi. While we were never far from the River, most of the route was through fields and farmland. Periodically we would go through a town or city – the route through Baton Rouge took us right by LSU and Tiger Stadium.
Rain clouds often formed in the afternoon. If it rains when you are on a bike, you just get wet. The only problems with rain are the potential for getting cold and the streets getting slippery. Since it was in the high 80’s in the afternoon, cold was not an issue. Wet streets just meant slowing down. If it rained enough that visibility was an issue, you simply pulled over and waited for the rain to let up. We all carried various types of rain jackets, but most of the time it was too hot to wear anything while riding in the rain. We were all wet from sweat anyway, so wet from rain was not a problem.
While rain is an annoyance, what cyclists really dislike is lightning. The only thing to do with lightning is try to seek shelter and avoid it. Sometimes, while riding in the middle of miles of fields, that’s difficult. Sometimes, crouching down in a ditch is the best you can do until a storm passes. Cyclists really dislike lightning.
Each evening, all the riders and staff got together to briefly review the route for the next day. We each got “cue sheets” which had very detailed directions, with mileage, for every turn and landmark along the way. All our bikes had speedometers with odometers so we could always tell where we were by matching our odometer reading to the cue sheet. That’s assuming, of course, that we paid attention and stayed on the route. If you missed a turn, you were off the route and on your own.
While Louisiana was flat and disappointing in terms of scenery, crossing into Mississippi, heading to Natchez, brought green, lush wooded areas and rolling hills. This was more of what I had in mind. Natchez has a fascinating history dating back hundreds of years. Shortly before the Civil War, it had a population of only about 6,000. It was home to more millionaires than any other American town, except New York and possibly Boston and Philadelphia. They were the richest cotton planters in the world and Natchez was their residential and social center. It was the symbolic capital of the Cotton Kingdom. Before the Civil War, there was nowhere in the world where you could find a more complete and concentrated group of Southern mansions than in Natchez.
Today Natchez has a population of about 18,000. We stayed in our first multi-story hotel. My room was on the fourth floor, requiring bringing my eight-foot bike up in an elevator. It turned out to be not as difficult as I thought. The trickiest part was getting it through the elevator door. But I learned how to pick it up (about 30 pounds) and hold it vertically, next to me. Another elevator trip with my two bags completed the transport.
The trip from Natchez to Vicksburg was 90 miles into a headwind. But it was without question the most scenic section so far. The road leading out of Natchez was fully canopied by trees and had almost no traffic. After 15 miles, we entered the Natchez Trace Parkway.
The original Natchez Trace was a 440-mile-long path extending from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It was used extensively by Native Americans and early explorers as both a trade and transit route in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Today, the trail has been commemorated with the 444-mile-long Natchez Trace Parkway, which follows the original trail’s approximate path. The Parkway passes through rolling wooded areas, is operated by the National Park Service, has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour, and is closed to commercial traffic. The AbBike vans had to get a special permits to join us on the Parkway. Traffic on the Parkway was almost non-existent. There are no billboards or services, only rest areas and historic sites. One such historic site was Emerald Mound, the second largest temple mound in the U.S. Its eight acres were built between 1300 and 1600 by ancestors of the Natchez Indians.
After leaving the idyllic Parkway, the last 25 miles into Vicksburg looked more like the real world. There were now fields with corn. We all got to know cornfields quite well as they provided excellent places for “pit stops,” or bathroom breaks. The corn in southern Mississippi was seven to eight feet high in places. David from Wisconsin, another recumbent rider (there were four on the trip), told me that they had not even planted the corn crop yet is his home state. I seem to remember, growing up in Minnesota, the expression “knee high by the Fourth of July” to describe the corn in that state. I never remember seeing it grow as high as it did in Mississippi.
Our route took us though Old Town Vicksburg, right on the banks of the Mississippi. To get to our motel, we had to ride up the bluffs to the high ground. After 90 miles into a headwind, it was all I could do to make the several hundred-foot climb. The route took us past the Vicksburg Military Park but most of us were too tired and it was too late to stop for a visit.
The ride out of Vicksburg was the first 100+ mile day. It was about 50 degrees at the start. For a good part of the day, we rode with the levee to our left. After 33 miles, we came to Onward, Mississippi. Onward is a one-building town. The combination general store/restaurant is in the middle of nowhere. Onward’s claim to fame is that Teddy Roosevelt was bear hunting here and spared the life of a captured bear by refusing to shoot it. This was supposedly the origin of the teddy bear. The building appears to have changed little from Roosevelt’s time.
The grassy yards of the farmhouses along the way often spanned both sides of the road. The locals saw so little traffic that I nearly got run over by a lady on her riding lawn mower, going from one side of the road to the other.
I was amazed at how many riders had never seen an armadillo before. While we didn’t see a lot of them wandering around, we saw lots of them squashed on the roads. So many, in fact that one of the riders came up with: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to the armadillos that it can be done.”
Besides lightning, one of the other potential problems that cyclists face is dogs. In many rural areas, dogs run loose. A few of them are vicious. On the ride into Memphis, I got my revenge: I attacked an attacking dog. He was running full bore down a hill, barking up a storm. He ran right into my front wheel. I thought at first that I had run over him, but I probably just hit him very hard. I had to at least have cracked a couple of his ribs. But he managed to get up and run back home. Amazingly, I remained upright. That’s my first dog story.
Before the trip, I assumed that I would see miles and miles of cotton fields in Mississippi. As it turned out, I didn’t see any cotton anywhere. Maybe it was the wrong time of year. What I did see were miles and miles of corn, and periodic acres of rice paddies. We were told that with the increased price of fuel, cotton fields were being planted with corn for conversion to alcohol for use as bio-fuel. That certainly seemed a possibility. From Mississippi on, we saw thousands of acres of corn being grown.
Northwestern Mississippi on into Tennessee reminded me of the rolling hills of northern Florida. The first eight-day segment of the GMRR was coming to a close, with the ninth day off to see the sights of Memphis. Getting my bike up on the elevator to the 10th floor of the hotel was now routine. If only they could just make elevator doors a tad larger.
Memphis to St. Louis: Days 10 - 14
Nine riders left us in Memphis and we picked up two more. AbBike sells their trips by the day, by the segment, or by the whole trip. The route north out of Memphis was beautiful. We saw very little traffic and many miles of tree-canopied roads. But now we were in the hills of west Tennessee. Many of the roads had the words “Bluff” and “Hill” in their names. Some of the route reminded me of the terrain where we have vacationed in western North Carolina. A rider from that state said the same thing at dinner.
One of our new riders, Mark, didn’t make it through his first day. He was descending one of the hills that had a “15% GRADE” sign at the top. He hit 40 miles an hour and crashed. When you are going that fast on a steep descent and then crash, you tend to keep going as the asphalt scrapes sections of skin off your body. Much of you ends up looking like raw hamburger. By the time he stopped, he was in serious condition. Imagine jumping out of a car going 40 mph. The first rider who came up behind him stopped and called 911. Being so far out in the countryside, it was amazing his cell phone worked at all. However, the closest cell tower was not in Tennessee, but across the river in Arkansas. Trying to explain exactly where they were was difficult and it took the ambulance nearly an hour to find them. Mark was a relatively young fellow and I imagine that was part of the reason he didn’t break any bones. But you had to flinch when looking at him on crutches with all his road rash. His wife came from St. Louis to take him home.
Mark was actually not the first casualty of the trip. Andrew, a cyclist from Milwaukee, got lost on the second day out of New Orleans and, on attempting a U-turn, ran into a pickup truck. The hospital in Louisiana told him he was just bruised and sent him home on crutches. When he got back to Milwaukee, he went to his local physician who took some X-rays and found that he had broken his pelvic bone in several places.
By 8:30 in the morning of day 12, we had been in three states. We rode out of Tennessee, spent about a half hour in Kentucky, and then crossed the river by ferry to Missouri. The ferry left from Hickman, Kentucky, and deposited us onto the shores of Missouri in the middle of fields of corn, miles from any town. There was only a concrete ramp on the Missouri side where the ferry dropped us off after a 20-minute ride. Cost: $2.00. The closest bridge in either direction, we were told, was 60 miles away. This was the first day of the Memorial Day weekend, and there were several families set up for a day of fishing along the banks of the Mississippi.
The first few hours in Missouri were along the floodplain. Periodically we would see the levees. With a blessed tailwind, we zoomed along toward Cape Girardeau. But before long, the cue sheet indicated a turn to the west. To the west was a very steep bluff. For the rest of our ride in Missouri, we would ride up and down that bluff and the surrounding Missouri hills. Engineers who build rural roads make no attempt to smooth out the hills them like they do with highways and interstates. In rural areas, they just lay the asphalt down on the ground. If there are steep hills, then there are steep roads. Eastern Missouri is loaded with steep hills. We rode on most of them. But the scenery was spectacular and the traffic very light. About the scenery, I kept saying to myself, “This is magnificent! This is what I came here to see.” About the hills, I kept saying to myself … well, I got tired of the hills.
Hills slow you down to a crawl and make you work for every mile. My bike has 27 speeds. In its lowest gear, I am moving only slightly faster than I can walk. Some of the riders didn’t have the low gears that I did. As I passed them walking their bikes up the slopes, I was moving slow enough to have short conversations with them. Walking or riding, the hills wore us out.
On day 13, we passed the halfway point of the trip. It was along a flat, straight road in a valley filled with fields. In the distance, you could see a gigantic hill. For miles, you just looked at that hill. You had way too much time to think about it.
The last day’s ride of this segment, into St. Louis, was on Memorial Day. We started riding in rain. The vistas from the scenic stops along the way would have much prettier without the rain. But it wasn’t the rain that put a damper on Memorial Day.
I was laboring up a hill when I heard the sound of a dog running at the left side of my bike seat. Barking dogs are a concern. But it is the silent ones, the ones we call “stealth dogs,” that you really worry about. This was a stealth dog. The seat on my recumbent bike is exactly 23 inches above the pavement. (When discussing dogs, upright bike riders sometimes call recumbent riders “meals on wheels.”) I heard a rider behind me yell at the same time I looked down. There, millimeters from my butt, was the massive head of a pit bull mix. I yelled, “GO HOME!” at the top of my lungs. It dropped off. The adrenalin level in my body set a new record. As I neared the top of the hill, I noticed another rider, J.B. from Maine, pulled off to the side of the road. I was about to say something about the dog when I noticed the blood dripping down his left calf into his shoe. He had already called the Sheriff, Animal Control, and GMRR staff. He was taken to a hospital. Animal Control found the dog and its owners, and very fortunately proof that the dog had had recent rabies shots. As it turned out, J.B. was the second of our riders to be bitten by that same dog. Bob, from Cincinnati, had been attacked about 20 minutes before J.B. Bob was the only rider on the trip without a cell phone, so he rode on, his left calf bleeding. When the van found him, he, too, went to the hospital.
Both J.B. and Bob were shaken but OK. I imagine they still have the scars from the dog’s teeth on the meaty part of their left calf muscles. The dog’s owners were an older retired couple living in a small trailer back in the woods. As is always the case in these situations, they assured the Animal Control guy that their beloved dog would never bite anyone.
I carry a small can of citronella spray for dogs. It is the same stuff that the Animal Control guy used. It smells like heavy, orange mist to people, but apparently dogs (and insects) are repelled by it. It is much easier and safer to use than pepper spray, which will blind people as well as dogs.
So I was lucky. I would have been bite number three – and it would not have been my calf that would have been bitten.
Shortly after the dog episode, we faced one of the longest hills on the trip. About half the riders got off and walked. Like the Energizer Bunny, the hill just kept going and going and going. Just when you figured you had to coming to the top, the road would curve and you would see it continue up. One thing about these hills, though: the vistas from the top were breathtaking (assuming you had any breath left to take).
The final miles into St. Louis were quiet. It was Memorial Day and no one was going into the downtown. Our hotel was a half block from the Gateway Arch. Traffic on any other afternoon would have been fierce. From the top of the last hill before the city, you could see the Arch in the distant haze. It made the rest of the day’s 80-mile ride seem shorter.
St. Louis to De Soto, Wisconsin: Days 16 - 23
By this time, any initial doubts I had about being able to do a ride like this had disappeared. All my body parts were functioning admirably. We had gone nearly a thousand miles and I felt stronger at the end of each day. I was seeing parts of the country that I had never been in before, at a pace that was perfect.
I spent part of the day off in St. Louis visiting the Arch with a number of other riders. Frank, our 77-year-old psychiatrist from California, decided to call it quits. Missouri’s hills were his undoing. His wife came to pick him up in their RV – they had intended to meet in Minneapolis. I hope I can be in as good a shape when I am 77. Frank was an inspiration to all of us youngsters in our 60’s.
The first day out of St. Louis was 109 miles. It started out in the rain, during which I had my first flat tire (front) of the trip. Fixing a flat on a regular ride is inconvenient. Fixing a flat in the rain with over a hundred miles in front of you is a pain in the ass. Twelve miles north of the city, our route took us over the old Route 66 bridge into Illinois. The bridge is open only to cyclists and pedestrians, and has picnic tables where cars used to be. They basically made the bridge into a park. Once in Illinois, our sixth state, we rode on a combination of levee tops and riverfront roads. The latter lead us through old farming and riverfront towns. We didn’t cross back into Missouri until the end of the day. Somewhere along the river road I had my second flat of the day – on the back tire, this time. Not my day. I changed it about ten yards down the road from our two tandem bike riders, who were changing their rear flat tire. Not their day, either.
We took our second ferry ride, this time across the Illinois River. The route took us through rolling hills and farmland. This was rural middle America at it’s best. Several of us stopped for lunch at a country store where the two women who owned and ran it were kind enough to make sandwiches for us. A big black dog slept in the middle of the road. The occasional traffic simply slowed down and drove around it.
I had my third and final flat tire shortly after lunch. In this case, cyclists would say that I actually had only two flats that day, one of them twice. That was because I failed to get all the glass fragments out of the front tire the first time it went flat. It took about 50 miles for the remaining pieces to slice through the new tube. But I faired better than David: he had four flats that day. There were at least five riders that flatted that day. It was the only day I had flat tires.
With the time out for fixing flats and eating lunch, I didn’t cross the Mississippi into Louisiana, Missouri until 4:30 that afternoon. We had started riding at 6:30 that morning. It was to be the longest day of riding on the GMRR.
On the last day of May we rode into Hannibal. Old main-street Hannibal looks like something from Disney World. We stayed in the Hotel Clemens. I saw a Samuel Clemens look-a-like leading a group of tourists past Tom Sawyer’s white picket fence and then Becky Thatcher’s home.
On the way to Hannibal, the cue sheet noted that one of the rest stops was at a “Scenic View.” By this time, we all knew what that meant – we had to climb several hundred feet to the top of the bluff. The 17% grade had about half of the riders walking instead of riding. But the view from the top was magnificent. You looked down to the Mississippi and miles of the Illinois floodplain on the other side. Everything was green and lush. We saw no cars at all at the stop.
With June came the severe weather warnings for the afternoons. We began to “race the rain.” That was a shame, because the scenery along the river bluffs was as good as it gets. We crossed back into Illinois and headed north to finally cross back to Keokuk, Iowa, the one and only stop in that, our seventh, state. The extremely black clouds starting forming to the west, heading in our direction. Late in the morning you could see lightning and then hear the thunder. With lightning as my motivation, I managed to get my speed up to 20 mph and outrun the storm. The folks behind me took shelter in barns, front porches, and anywhere else they could find. As predicted, it was severe. We would face the same storm warnings nearly every day for the final week of the trip.
Because of the rapids, and before any locks were built, Keokuk used to be the northern limit for steamboats on the Mississippi. Now there are locks from Keokuk all the way past Minneapolis. We traveled through Nauvoo, the early 1800’s Mormon city, and Moline, the home of John Deere. Then we hit the “Illinois Alps.” That’s what they called the area around Galena. There were lots of “TRUCKS USE LOWER GEAR” and “15% GRADE” signs to be seen. This area, including southwest Wisconsin, was unique in not being touched by glaciers (geologist call it a “driftless” area). Glaciers tended to smooth out the rough terrain. The “Alps” were anything but smooth. If there was any doubt about the terrain, signs pointing to the area’s ski resorts confirmed the steepness of the topography. My brakes wore down more in the two days on either side of Galena than in two years in Florida.
At the end of day 22 we were in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, our eighth state. I wrote in my journal: “Well, I made it to Wisconsin. That is a milestone of sorts, being next door to Minnesota and within reach of Mike if I need rescuing.” Mike is my brother, who lives in Minneapolis. That innocent comment proved to be incredibly ironic.
Halfway into day 23 of the 25 day GMRR (at mile 1553 of 1748), heading into a rest stop in the tiny town of De Soto, Wisconsin, I hit a patch of loose gravel spread out over the asphalt shoulder of the highway and crashed. I had had two bad crashes before during the past ten years or so of cycling. This one seemed similar – at first. A crash on a recumbent is simple: one moment you’re riding and the next moment you and the bike are on your side, on the pavement. It occurs before you know what is happening. In the prior two crashes, I got serious road rash. This time, as I was lying on my left side, I knew it was different. Since this was at the entrance to a rest stop, GMRR staffers immediately came over. They helped me to my feet, or I should say to my foot. I could not put any weight at all on my left leg. As is the practice with an unknown injury like this, they called for an ambulance. The EMT said we were going to La Crosse, about 30 miles to the north, and asked whether I wanted the Catholic hospital or the Lutheran hospital. With my Scandinavian background there really was no question. The Lutheran hospital turned out to be a Level II Trauma Center, which for me meant I was immediately seen by two orthopedists specializing in traumatic accidents. They confirmed, with X-ray and then CT scan, that I had two small breaks in my left acetabulum (the socket on the pelvic bone which articulates with the leg bone). They said this kind of damage often occurred in front-end-collision car accidents when the victim’s leg was jammed into the acetabulum.
Neither the orthopedists nor I understand why this kind of damage occurred from a bicycle crash. It was a “freak accident.” They recommended against surgery. When surgeons recommend against surgery, I agree. They said eight to ten weeks on crutches – I couldn’t put any weight at all on my left leg and couldn’t lay or sleep on my left side. I said no problem – I’m retired. I asked if, after a while, I could continue to ride my bike. They said riding a bike was great therapy for this type of injury – assuming I didn’t fall over onto the asphalt again. Surgeons have a sense of humor – at least Scandinavian ones.
Morphine pumps are great. I felt great. While in the hospital (day 24), I noticed the sky outside getting black. Then a nurse came in and closed the drapes. I asked why and she said that was standard procedure in severe weather. I later talked with Bob, from Boston, about riding that day. It had been another 100-mile day. He said he and another rider heard sirens along the route. Not knowing what they meant, they kept riding. Shortly, they were stopped by the driver of a pickup truck who shouted, “What the hell are you doing out riding your bikes with the tornado sirens blaring?” David told me he ran into winds so strong while crossing the bridge into Red Wing, Minnesota, that he walked his bike across. He was afraid he would get blown off the bridge. So, it turned out not to be a bad day to stay in bed – just me and my morphine pump. After a couple of days in the hospital, brother Mike made the several-hour drive down to get me. I got to his condominium on the same day I would have if I had traveled by bike.
So, I started my retirement by making a 23-day, 1553-mile bicycle trip from Louisiana to Wisconsin. Then I spent nine weeks on crutches (and sleeping on my right side) and several more weeks walking with a cane. I am writing this about five months after the crash; I’m cycling 120 miles a week and walking just fine. I still am a tad stiff in my left hip, after sitting for a while, but I guess if I’m old enough to be retired, I’m old enough to have the occasional stiff joint. Right?