48.4 mi / 11.9 mph / 431 ft. climbing
Home: Motel 6

Taking a “cold day” was a good choice. While the morning temperature on our day off didn’t quite get below freezing, it only rose to 46°F at its peak, so that would have made for a pretty miserable day of riding, especially with the 15mph north winds. This morning actually dawned colder, at 28°F, but it was up to 40°F by the time we left our motel, and briefly peaked at a more-reasonable 55°F. Still, I’m hard-pressed to remember if we’ve had a day of riding with a lower average temperature. Maybe in October in Northern California? Luckily the ample sun meant that we never needed to break out our down jackets or long-fingered gloves.

I knew Rett was keeping moving to stay warm, but I was still surprised that we’d already covered 17 miles when we took our first break, most of it on minor roads (bypassing US-90) on the way to Ocean Springs. This town had been recommended as a Mobile day-trip alternative to Fairhope, and while we could see signs of a similarly classy wealth as we passed through, we weren’t inspired to take any time or energy to see if it competed well with Fairhope (I don’t think it has any storybook houses, so, unlikely!)

The big new bridge into Biloxi had full-width shoulders that we could have stayed in, but unusually-for-us, we crossed over to use the wrong-side bike path, partly because we’d be continuing on a trail/sidewalk on the left side afterwards. Biloxi makes me think of the movie ‘Biloxi Blues’, which I’ve never actually seen, but for some reason got embedded in my 11-year-old memory for how ‘Biloxi’ was stupidly pronounced as if it’s spelled with a ‘U’ rather than an ‘O’. Thus, the word ‘Bilucksee’ kept annoyingly playing in my head the entire ride through. The city seemed to mostly be a place for people to come to gamble, so along with the annoying sidewalk/trail that we were stuck on, my associations 20 years from now are unlikely to be improved from my annoyance at its pronunciation.

US-90 had been a comfortable place on our previous ride, but from Biloxi to Pass Christian it’s a shoulderless two lanes in each direction through a much more populated area, and while traffic levels were moderate enough that it probably would have been survivable, most people ride the “bike path” that sits between the highway and the endless white sand beach. Getting through Biloxi was the worst segment of it, where in many places it was much more of a “sidewalk” than a “bike path”, but once we got through there, we never had any thought of switching to try out the highway. It surely helped that there were essentially zero beach-goers on this cold day; if it was 30 degrees warmer our “path” likely would have been a chaotic nightmare.

By the time we got hungry for lunch at 1pm, the temperature had only risen to 47°F. Unlike yesterday, we weren’t wet, and it was sunny, but still the north wind would have chilled us while we sat outside and ate. If we could find a place to sit with a wall to our north, it would both block the wind and concentrate the sun. Luckily we found such a place at a tower for a pedestrian bridge crossing US-90. With our chairs sinking into the beach’s white sand low enough for the 3-foot concrete ramp to protect us from behind, it was so comfortable that it was a bit shocking how cold it remained when we stood up to leave. But maybe that’s because you don’t expect a day at the beach to be so cold (and this is literally the most time we’ve spent “on the beach” in the last…eight months of coast-riding?)

The town of Pass Christian seemed to have a historic marker at every other property, so looked like it would have been a nice place to visit (a historic hotel had a cheap rate last night that tripled for the weekend). It was interesting to see the effect of different building codes/insurance requirements across state lines; I had often wondered in Florida why very few stilt-houses put in any effort to make their stilt-spaces more useful by enclosing the open base level with board-walls on one or multiple sides, like they do in the Outer Banks. Well, here in Mississippi, suddenly most of the stilt houses have near fully-enclosed lower levels again (usually with some gaps between the boards to allow floodwaters to flow through), which tells me that it must be a regulatory effect.

The bridge to Bay St. Louis was a twin of the one to Biloxi, down to the artistic aquatic-themed plaques marking each tenth-mile (each unique!) Even though it was still a couple hours before sunset, clouds had moved in and a gap near the horizon was already glowing orange. The temperatures had begun diving again, so we were glad to reach our motel. I needed to remind the workers at the Wendy’s to include a couple of our dinner items that they’d forgotten, and the cheese fries were cold and unmelted, but it was literally 40 steps from the door of our room, so, fair trade!