Day 11: Just what the Dr Ordered

The Lees keep cats and dogs, and though I’ve never been the allergic type, I woke with a running nose and a head full of static. Their dogs started up outside around five, and by five-thirty I gave in and got up, tired and thoroughly bunged up. A cup of proper Earl Grey set me right again — there is nothing that tea cannot fix, apparently, not even Virginia’s local wildlife. Cooper eventually surfaced, and before we hit the road we stopped at a gas station so I could pick up another of those 5-hour shots. I was a convert now.

It didn’t work the same magic today. Cooper was flying and I was ignoring the burn in my thighs just to keep pace. The sky had been threatening all morning and eventually made good on it, so we ducked under a shelter on a local bike trail and raided the store next door while the rain worked itself out. “Are you from Liverpool?” a woman there asked me — she’d spent time in northern England once, and I gave her full credit for at least placing me somewhere north of London. Her favourite place in the whole world, she told me, was right here in Draper. Draper being, as far as I could tell, a gas station and a portable toilet. Each to their own.

We rode sluggishly after the rain, only a third of the way through the day by one o’clock, the hills steady and frequent enough that the whole afternoon felt like one long climb. We passed a Gatorade bottling plant the size of a small mountain and hollered something about it to an old man on his porch, who called us over, informed us he “ain’t got the gatorade,” and handed us cold, fizzy peach water instead — genuinely one of the more refreshing things I’ve drunk on this trip. He introduced himself as Perry Graham, told us how the trucks had taken over the area, how he never got so much as a discount from the plant down the road, how a disability had forced him into retirement. Then, without much warning, he turned religious on us, his voice rising as he described the divine healing he’d received. We thanked him kindly for the peach water and got moving again.

The outskirts of Wytheville brought a busy truck stop, cars and rigs everywhere, and one of the most disappointing Subways either of us had ever eaten — they seemed to be out of everything we actually wanted. We pushed through the last few climbs into Rural Retreat, where the Historical Society lets touring cyclists stay the night. Cooper rang the number taped to the locked door and a woman appeared almost immediately to show us around: a stocked kitchen, hot showers, real beds. Free, she said, though donations were kindly appreciated. She handed over the key and left us to it. The place, it turns out, was the birthplace and deathplace of the man Dr Pepper is named after — a connection, we’d later learn, that’s rather looser than the town lets on, the drink itself being Texan through and through and the name arriving secondhand through a friend of a friend. Rural Retreat isn’t giving up its claim to fame that easily, and I don’t blame them.

I opened the fridge to find it stocked with free Gatorade and Dr Pepper, and then, tucked at the back, two beers. Cooper and I fell on them without shame, toasting a hard day’s riding, then walked to the store to buy replacements for the next tired cyclist who’d come looking.

Best moment so far.

The champagne of beers.

Places like the Rural Retreat Historical Society aren’t the kind of thing you’d ever plan a trip around, and yet they’ve become the best of it. That woman handed two strange, sweaty cyclists the keys to an entire museum without a flicker of doubt that we’d treat it right and leave something behind on the way out. She must have been proven right more times than she could count to be that comfortable with strangers — and it does something to restore your faith in people, especially set against some of the characters I’ve crossed paths with back home in Newcastle and Middlesbrough. Life, right now, is good.