Day 10: Then There Were Two

I was up before the motel breakfast even opened, too restless to sit still, eager to get moving toward Radford. The night before I’d called Dr. Lee, whose card had come from the bike house — a TransAm rider himself back in ’98, who now opens his door to whoever rolls through. I ate my way through waffles, cereal, and eggs, then chased it all with one of those 5-hour energy shots I’d picked up the day before.

Good morning, America.

I’ve always been a skeptic about those little energy bottles, but this one worked some kind of magic. The first twenty miles toward Catawba climbed steadily and I stayed up in a high gear the whole way, sprinting over every rise like I had something to prove. It was Sunday, early, the roads empty, the weather about as good as it gets. I found a turtle parked in the middle of the lane sunning himself with a total disregard for his own mortality, and moved him off before a truck could settle the matter for him.

Ello, ello.

A gorgeous morning for riding — the cables running through the shot rather spoiled it.

Then, cresting a hill, I spotted another rider up ahead. Panniers. Not local. TransAm, had to be. I got back up on the pedals and went after him, and by the time he heard me coming and glanced over his shoulder, I’d caught him. Cooper, twenty-six, out of Minnesota, headed for the same door I was — the Lees’ place in Radford. They’d told him an Englishman was staying too. That was me. We talked bikes and bags and gear ratios and forgot entirely about the miles, which is exactly how you want the next twenty to go. A week in, and it turned out we agreed on the same thing: there’s something to be said for company. He’d even stayed at my motel back in Lexington, the same night, one wall between us the whole time and neither of us knew it.

Cooper.

He needed to relieve himself at the roadside, so we pulled over — and seconds later a truck turned down the very driveway he’d chosen, rolling past smiling and waving, blissfully unaware of what it had just missed. We stopped in the little town of Ellet for gatorade and bananas and got onto the subject of the cookie lady. He’d spent a night alone in the bike house too, and agreed it was a genuinely unsettling place after dark, all that old furniture just hanging there like it was waiting for something.

I could have sworn we’d come further than that.

Twenty miles still stood between us and Radford, the first seven of them a proper killer climbing into Christiansburg. It hurt, but it was over quicker than either of us expected, and what followed was one long, glorious downhill coast all the way into town — I hit thirty on it without touching the brakes once. We stopped at Arby’s to refuel before hunting down the Lees’ house, where we were handed glasses of iced water and told to shower, do our laundry, and flip a coin for the bed.

Arby’s. Don’t mind if I do.

I lost the coin toss. The sofa suited me fine.

We finished our first map that night, the one that had carried us the length of Virginia — the new one would see us out of the state and halfway through Kentucky. Fifty-nine miles that day, four hundred and one since Yorktown, and by the arithmetic we worked out over the sofa, ten percent of the whole ride behind us. Ten percent down, and for the first time in a week, someone to share it with.