Day 25: Cooper's Last Ride

Horses trotting past the tent walls made for a strange alarm clock, but it did the job, and I got up to eggs and bread and the daily comedy of watching Cooper wake. He’s always last, and always the same — a few minutes of blinking around at the rest of us breaking camp like he can’t quite place where he is or how he got there. I told him he looked like death warmed up. It got the laugh it always gets. We finished packing and rolled out into a morning that gave us nothing to write home about, just heat to duck out of wherever a patch of shade offered itself.

Lunch was in Goreville, at Delaney’s, a place every cyclist on this route seems to know by name before they’ve ever seen it. I had the taco salad. Then came the cherry pie — free, for anyone who rolls through on two wheels, which is the kind of local tradition that makes a hard day feel like it’s rooting for you.

We hadn’t gone far out of town before the sky turned on us, dark clouds stacking up and thunder rolling somewhere close. It looked like a soaking was coming whether we liked it or not. Instead the road bent and turned just enough, by pure accident of the route, to carry us around the worst of it — we came out the other side with nothing worse than a light, almost welcome sprinkle.

Coasting on toward Carbondale, Joe’s front tyre let out a scream of escaping air loud enough to make us all flinch — a thorn, straight through. We pulled over so he could patch it, and Cooper used the stop to swap a tyre of his own, one that had been leaking so slowly he could pump it up in the morning and ride most of a day on the fading pressure before it turned obvious again.

Roadside workshop

Patched up and rolling again, we came on a lake big enough to be impossible to ignore on a day this sticky, and pulled off without much discussion. Nobody bothered changing out of their cycling kit — a few minutes back on the bike in this heat and it would be dry again anyway — and the water, when we hit it, was about as close to perfect as water gets.

Carbondale, when we finally reached it, meant fifty-five miles behind us and motel beds ahead. Joe had called a local bike shop days in advance to line up a service — this being their busiest stretch of the year, they were booked solid, but a shop like that always finds room for riders crossing the whole country. We unloaded the panniers and rode the bikes down before closing, planning to take a rest day tomorrow and collect them in the evening. Supper was at the Chinese place next door to the motel, food good and the beer better. It was also Cooper’s last night with us — tomorrow he’d head home for a wedding, promising to rejoin the trail in about a week.