Day 29: Rollin'

There was no breakfast to speak of this morning, so we set off toward Centerville running on nothing but a packet of instant oats Terry had mixed up for us. We were into the Ozarks proper now, and they’re a different animal from the Appalachians entirely — the climbs are short, over almost before you’ve noticed them, and then start right back up again. I’d toyed with the idea of leaving at five to reach Eminence in time for England against Algeria, and talked myself out of it the second I actually woke up in the tent. The highlights run on ESPN every evening regardless, and today was shaping up to be a tricky enough ride without racing the clock too. I settled for promising myself I wouldn’t miss the third and final group game.

Every town since day one has been covered in election posters like this.

In Centerville a heavyset man in braces was wandering the street picking up loose change, and when I asked him where to get breakfast he pointed me to the town’s one diner, adding that they were painfully slow about it. We ate there anyway and pushed on for Eminence, having stocked up beforehand since services were thin on this stretch. The hills rolled all day long — nothing brutal, just relentlessly technical, the kind where you drop down through the gears at the base of a climb, crest it, get half a second to shift back up before the descent’s already spent, and then you’re climbing again. It has a way of making a rider lazy. I spent most of the day parked in one of my bottom gears and didn’t fight it.

Dr Lee, back in Radford, had told us Missouri was the toughest state on his whole tour. I can believe the hills never let up, though it hasn’t felt too bad — maybe I’m just fitter now than I was when we started. I barely got a picture worth keeping all day either, which tells you something about how little energy I had left for anything but pedalling.

We’d been eyeing rivers from every bridge we crossed since morning, and eventually one looked too good to keep riding past. We stashed the bikes in the bushes and climbed down to find it cool, shallow, and perfect for sitting in for a while. Joe and I were still down there when Terry caught up and leaned over the rail of the bridge to see what we’d found.

The trouble with rivers out here is that they always sit at the bottom of a climb, and this one delivered the biggest of the day right on schedule. My Gatorade was gone and my water was getting there, so I huffed my way up the last few hills on fumes until the Eminence sign finally showed itself. Joe and I pulled into a Dairy Queen so old it might have opened with the town, and got talking to another TransAm rider who’d just ended his trip over failing health — an older guy, laid low by a bout of shingles. The others have been ribbing me for weeks about my tick paranoia, and fair enough, I do spot the odd one crawling up a leg every time we stop and have long since given up standing near the grass. Sure enough, I looked down at my thigh at the Dairy Queen to find one already embedded, small enough that it couldn’t have been feeding long. I got the tweezers out, pulled it clear by the head, and watched it stagger around the table for a few seconds before I finished the job. Mostly harmless things, ticks, though the wrong one left in too long can hand you Lyme disease and a course of antibiotics to go with it.

We booked a room at a B&B up the street, and the owner looked pleasantly surprised when we told her we were cyclists — she’d been braced for Harley riders. I found the England score and watched the highlights. What a joke. Still, I was glad I hadn’t burned another day chasing a live broadcast the way I had for the first match. Burgers and beers across the road, then a slice of chocolate cake back at the B&B, and I was asleep in a proper bed before I knew it.