auto touring [and tourist] days

21 July 2011
Farmington, VA to Washington, D.C, 913 miles

And then we were driving a car on the road.

How did this happen and why are we doing this !?

It certainly was a strange feeling getting behind the wheel for the first time in over 50 days. This trip has been a series of experiences, each of which has afforded us new perspectives. The hardest part about starting this trip was getting over the idea that we might only be traveling 25 miles a day (when we were fighting the Sierra Cascades in California with no touring experience, this was true). Mentally this was something hard to come to grasps with when you are used to being able to drive that distance in a half hour. This is not even taking into account flying! But in any case, we all live very busy lives with incredibly fast paced schedules and what we were doing was going against all of these habits and feelings. For the first two weeks we thought a lot about traveling in ways other than by our bikes. Is there a bus that will take us up this mountian? Is there a train that will cross that desert? But then something clicked in our minds. It just happened one day, and we stopped thinking about anything except for the biking. Everyday just became an adventure in its own right. It did not matter how long it would take to get there in a car, because we were on a bike, and we only had one place to get to by the end of the day.

We were about to change all of this by starting to drive again. We were doing this out of what we thought to be, at least at the time, necessity. The beginning of this drive was, in a word, uneasy. We were doing the exact opposite of many of the things that were making our trip so exceptional. The stagnation of sitting in a car instead of pedaling a bike, the speed at which things went by, and the amont of things that we both felt that we were constantly missing. No matter how much you think you can stop and smell the roses while touring in a car, there is just nothing like touring on a bike. The connection that you get with the landscape, the people, and places you would never otherwise stop, are all lost. We traveled over 900 miles without talking with a single person. In the same distance on a bike, we would have had literally dozens of conversations with people along the way and actually experienced much of what was hardly even perceptable at 70 mph.

Then, the states just started to fly by. The highway is not very interesting, and is primarly homogeneous. The terrain and surroundings for the start of our trip all looked pretty much the same. We quickly passed through St. Louis. If only we had know that we would have been doing this we could have just stayed on the Katy trail and picked up the rental there!

Then we were in Illinois. From our perspective on the highway this was just a lot of corn. Corn we have definitely experenced a lot of. But something about this actually made us miss the smell of the cornfields that we had passed on our bikes.





Then Kentucky:












And into West Virginia:



From West Virginia we went into Maryland, back into West Virginia, and then into Virginia before finally making it to D.C.

Before leaving West Virginia we stopped the car. Did we really want to do this? It was really leaving us with an unsettling feeling. We were carving a giant gap in a trip that has come to mean a lot to both of us through the simplicity of just being able to bike. We had complicated things and now we were driving across the country. We would soon see the coastline that we thought we would only first see from the saddles of our bikes and from our own propulsion. Should we just go back and start biking again? We decided not to. We continued on. This time, we were continuing, not because it felt like it was the right thing to do, but because we felt as though we had to.

We experienced rolling hills throughout Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia. There were definitely some steep climbs involved but most of it would be considered to be rolling (especially from our perspective on a major highway driving in a car).

In Virginia we struck the full force of the Appalachian mountains. The mountains were becoming very steep as the sun was disappearing behind the horizon. We were off of the major highway and spent hours on dark two lane roads tackling the steep grades and constantly curving roads. We had less confidence that our Chevy Aveo was going to make it up some of the mountains than we would have had in our bikes (but we were going up and down them so much faster!). Yes, we were moving much faster than we have in a very long time. Our car was only capable of climbing some of the steep grades at 10-15 mph under the speed limit. This did not matter as the darkness pressed us to proceed with great caution anyway. We had to be careful of the wildlife as we passed by several deer on the side of the road and avoided hitting a baby racoon and a possum that were in the middle of the road, hidden by darkness, dips in the road, and turns.

In the very early hours of the morning we decided to stop and recharge at the Waffle House. Chris had been doing all of the night driving and he wanted to be in good driving condition despite that we only had about an hour left in our journy. {Excuses, excuses .... } The coffee, bright lights, and bored (but entertaining) night-shift at waffle house prepared us for the road. After coffee, waffles, eggs, and hash browns, we decided to try one of the Waffle House "Original" Angus burgers. For $1 with melted cheese and grilled onions you just can't go wrong! I had no idea what a delicious slider you could get a Waffle House! I will definitely return in the future just for this.






Emily looking at the katydid crawling up the glass (in the photo above he is sitting on the Aveo):



As we got closer to Washington, D.C, the traffic began to increase and the sun started to come up. We were able to cruise into the city listening to NPR's Morning Edition while driving alongside people driving into the city to start work that morning.

We found an Econo Lodge using Google maps that was only about 30 minutes from the White House. This seemed perfect. The hotel manager was nice enough to give us a nicely discounted rate, and gave us the room for the following night (the 22nd), without charging us at all for the 21st. Essentially, we were able to check into our hotel at 6 AM, sleep for a few hours, and then go back out to explore the city!

At the very least, the quality of our pictures has definitely decreased in this part of our cross country trip. Shooting from a moving vehicle (and sometimes through the windshield) certainly does not compare with stopping on the side of the road.

July 22, 2011
Washington, D.C, 43 miles

Chris has never been to Washington, D.C. before, and Emily has only been there once before. We both had a lot of fun exploring and it turned out to be a very good addition to our trip despite some of the mixed feelings that we have been having about our decision to drive to the East coast.

The Capitol Building, one of our first sights in the city during our drive through the Washington Mall.


After doing some driving through the city we found a parking spot near the Smithsonian museums of American History and Natural History. We spent hours exploring both and hardly had time to see a fraction of each of them. Each of these museums is so vast that we could spend individual days in each of them. Next time we will have to come for a week!



Original steam train from 1831:


We took a look at the currency exhibit, in which we learned about ancient forms of money, different printing techniques, the advent of paper money, and some interesting "coins" along the way:



In the museum of Natural History, we explored an excellent exhibit on the evolution and development of humans. This went hand in hand with the book that Chris is currently reading: _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies_, by Jared Diamond. In this exhibit, beyond human skulls, skeletons, fossils, and ancient artifacts, there were also gigantic bacteria models, like the Bubonic Plague (_Yersinia pestis_):



(Chris really appreciated these :)

Next we walked over to see the White House, stopping by the White House Museum first (primarily to escape the extreme heat and high humidity



The White House! There was a lot of security to keep us at this "safe" distance:






The Washington Monument:



Inside the Smithosonian Air and Space Museum! Never mind what we said before, we could definitely spend an entire week just in this museum next time we come to this city!

Emily and a working model of the Mars Explorer:




Chris next to the gondola that took the first two people around the world, nonstop by hot air baloon:



This place is just filled with hours of things to look at:





The Spirit of St Louis:






At the end of the day we took another drive through the city.




The Library of Congress:




Sunset over the Potomic:



23 July 2011
Washington, D.C to Whiteville, NC, 560 miles

Today was a driving day. We drove and drove and drove. We decided to take a scenic route that was not too scenic. Along the way we saw this giant bridge when we went over the Chesepeake Bay:






We drove through many more cornfields, small towns that seemed to mix the Kansas farming with seafood; signs for crabs and local fish abunded.

Soon we came to a toll booth and payed a whopping 12 dollars to go over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. We couldn't possibly understand how anything could cost so much money! We also weren't sure if we were going over a bridge or a tunnel.... The bridge-tunnel goes right along the border of the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. It was a really scenic sight.








It turns out the bridge-tunnel meants bridges and tunnels!








It was very strange after going through the tunnel to look back at the island we had just come from:


After many miles we left the bridge-tunnel and arrived in Norfolk, Virginia. This area is home to a gigantic crate-shipment port, as well as what appeared to be a shipyard:


Soon we were out of the city and into the countryside again (with more cornfields). We drove through gently rolling hills and headed South towards South Carolina. We started calling hotels in Myrtle Beach, trying to find a place to stay. Everywhere was booked! This was worrisome as we needed to return the car at the Myrtle Beach airport at 8am the next morning.... What could we do!? Even the nearby cities' hotels were all booked. We decided to stop in Whiteville, a city about an hour from Myrtle Beach and drive the rest of the way in the morning. There wasn't much else we could do. We stopped around midnight, crawled into a nice bed, set our alarms, and passed out. Driving is much more exhausting than bicycling.

Location:Farmington, VA to Washington, D.C, to Whitesville, NC