The Finish Line and Beyond

I left Lake Charles following the route that were given me by Laura at the Cameron MDS site. As I pedaled south, I questioned my decision to go down to the Gulf Coast before turning east. The wind was blowing hard out of the west, hardest I had dealt with since Wyoming, I would say. A few miles south of Lake Charles I crossed Friesen Road, which made me chuckle a little. I took a picture and wondered what the relationship was between this road and my surname. Continuing south I rode through the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge. Along this road I saw several small, flattened alligators on the road before seeing one larger, more obviously three-dimensional alligator scurry across the road ahead of me. The creature was too quick and I was unable to get my camera out in time to get a picture. It was a short day on the bike and I got to the MDS site fairly early, but the day was not without its challenges. The stiff wind was more irritating that anything for most of the day, but it became a little more dangerous as I rode across the bridge spanning the Intracoastal Waterway. As I climbed (still locked into my large front chainring), the wind got stronger and tried to push me into traffic. I stopped to take a few pictures at the top, and it felt like I was going to get blown over the edge. Much of the ride this day had no shoulder to speak of, and off both sides of the road was stagnant, swampy water. The final 9 miles of the day were the most difficult. When I got to Creole, I turned west towards Cameron and straight into the wind. Without the ability to change my front gears, I was stuck cranking pretty hard on my pedals.

When I got to the MDS site, I stashed my belongings in the bunk trailer, had a bite to eat, then biked over to the work site another two miles down the road where I joined a group of men from the Goshen, Indiana, area that were building columns for two different houses. The houses were going to be about 8 feet off the ground. There were a few questions for me as I pulled up, but everyone seemed pretty focused on their tasks, so I just jumped in and tried to find a way to help. The next day when we showed up to work, a journalist arrived at the work site to interview me. As we worked throughout the day, one of the future home owners named Jeb did whatever he could to help us out. He had a tractor with forks on the front, so he moved pallets of brick and cement around. He also provided the entertainment during our breaks. He had some great stories about alligator hunting. Over lunch we went out to see a shrimping boat that a friend of his owned. The boat was docked because the engine was blown and needed to get fixed. It was pretty fascinating to learn about how that business works. We ended up getting all of the columns finished and ready to be filled with cement the following day. This trip to Cameron was not on my original itinerary, but I'm glad it worked out for me to stop there for a day. After cycling all over the country, repeating daily why I am doing this bike trip and telling people what MDS is, it was great to be able to be on a work site, see the people that are doing the work and the people that are benefiting from it, and to do something for MDS other than talk. During the day we were focused on building a house, so my trip was not the center of attention. I wasn't wearing tights and a helmet, so I didn't stick out in a crowd. And best of all, nobody knew it was my birthday, so I didn't get any special treatment on that front either. I don't think I could have had a better day.

The next morning I got up with everyone else, had breakfast, and hit the road about the same time they were all headed to the work site. I headed through the swamp toward Abbeville where I would meet my parents and maternal grandmother. On the way, I saw many more two- and three-dimensional alligators along the roadway. I stopped in Pecan Island to eat my packed lunch from the MDS site, and ended up talking to a couple of people about my trip. It was weird to tell the one man that I had been on the road for more than 5-1/2 months and that I'd be finishing the trip tomorrow. I was fully aware of how close I was to the finish, but it felt very different to say it out loud. The man was rather fascinated and seemed as though he needed to tell someone about this guy he had just met. He shouted over to his traveling companion in the truck that I was biking all over the country, but the other man didn't seem to care so much. From there I pedaled the rest of the way to Abbeville and checked into a hotel to wait for my family to arrive. When my parents have visited me during this trip, I tend to stay in nicer places and eat better food, so I didn't bother finding anything to eat before they arrived.

The next day I knew it was going to be a short day, so we didn't hurry to get out of the hotel. I needed to time my arrival at the New Iberia MDS site for about noon so I could be received appropriately. I think I would have arrived within about two minutes of noon, one way or the other, but road conditions forced me to take another route that extended my travel time by about 15 minutes. At the finish line, they actually had a finish line set up. My uncle Kim had joined my parents and his mother at the finish, and had even contacted a local news station. The news people were late, but they still came and interviewed me when they got there. The MDS volunteers prepared a fantastic lunch for the group of us, so we dined and celebrated over the lunch hour. Eventually I took a shower, packed up the bike, and we hit the road towards Henderson.

In the wake of this journey of a lifetime, I am now set with the task of figuring out how everything--everything I have seen, everyone I've met, everything I've felt--how it all fits together in the bigger picture. I've been living for 27 years. How does this 6 month trip fit with the 26 years and 6 months that preceded? What does this mean for the years to come? Obviously this has been on my mind as I have been biking, but being back into a stable environment after becoming accustom to instability and uncertainty, I am now confronted daily with questions I can't answer about what this trip has meant to me. Give me some time and I may come up with something a little more concrete to say in retrospect.

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Readers: I'm not a blogger. This blog is about the bike trip called CycleMDS. I will not continue to blog about my personal life outside of this trip. I may post once more if I come up with some sort of coherent reflection that makes more sense than that last paragraph. In the one week off the bike thus far, that hasn't come. Thank you all for reading, and I apologize for the rather anticlimactic final blog post.