20.7 mi / 11.5 mph / 41 ft. climbing
Home: Emilie’s AirBNB

Today we would backtrack 15 miles into New Orleans, starting on the same Mississippi River Trail that conveniently has a connection a few blocks from the campground. Its levee-top location means that it has surprisingly-few access points, and unlike other spots where the path angles up the slope, this one hits it straight on. You can always make your own path up and down the grassy hill to directly access the nearby residential streets, as evidenced by people walking their dogs, or a couple football-guys using it for hill training. But that would still be a chore best avoided with our heavy bikes. On the official trail, I was able to make it up the 15%(?) grade, but Rett’s lack of gear-shifting practice had her walking.

Dropping back into the city then was a challenge, again, because…parades! Even though it was still relatively-early in the morning, today’s parades were running in the daytime. Our route mostly-paralleled the parade route, and if it was any other parade day we could have stayed easily north of the mess since the staging area hooks south, but today was the one day a second staging area hooked north too, to accommodate Iris, the largest krewe of the season! Luckily we were able to sneak between a couple of their floats, but then we still had to battle our way through the grid of confusing one-way streets to make further progress.

At one point we rode through Tulane University, another case of “I guess I now know what state [Very Familiar University Name] is in!” It made me realize how this overnight out-and-back allowed us to see even more of New Orleans that we otherwise would have had no reason to explore.

So thank you New Orleans! Post-Katrina, I remember that there were serious voices questioning whether it made sense to even rebuild the city. “It’s below sea-level, the population was shrinking even before the massive abandonment, and with hurricanes becoming stronger and more frequent, should the rest of the country really be subsidizing (via insurance premiums) the continued existence of this city that nature will be happy to just wreck all over again?” As a Northerner, who had only spent a couple days in the city pre-Katrina (and this visit revealed how I had seen essentially none of it during that trip), I was naively sympathetic to that argument. And who knows, maybe leaving the city for dead would have been the right decision in some logical, pragmatic sense. But selfishly, I’m now incredibly glad that no one else listened to those voices. Because the people arguing the other side, that New Orleans is something special and unique, and losing its culture would have been a loss for our nation and the world, were not just performing self-interested boosterism. They were correct!

Interestingly, the unique elements of that culture (the music, the food, Mardi Gras) don’t even have much to do with its physical setting, so “let’s all just leave this place behind and agree to reconvene 50 miles away on slightly-higher ground” could have worked in some theoretical sense. But of course while culture flows from people, people become tied to a place, and in some way the place has an influence on peoples’ thoughts and behavior. So it seems extremely unlikely that such a cultural transplant would ever succeed in practice. It would have been an interesting experiment, but I’m glad the New Oreleanians didn’t try it.

The city has now had 20 years of upswing since Katrina, but if another hurricane had assaulted the city in 2010, or if the storm had accelerated the economic downward spiral to oblivion, the naysayers would have been able to say “I told you so”. Avoidance of the former is just luck, but much credit goes to the city for not allowing the latter to happen; just in the last couple months it has hosted Taylor Swift, the Super Bowl, and Mardi Gras, and even being a target for a terrorist attack is proof of its success. I’m happy to admit that I had severely underestimated this town, and I caution everyone else from doing the same!

Amtrak was a little different than we’d been used to recently. Ever since they introduced trainside loading of bikes, we have been the ones to roll our bikes to the baggage car and hand them up to the attendant. Here, they just had us unload our bags at the ticket counter, and then workers put the bikes on the platform while we sat with everyone else in the waiting area. They might think that they’re making our lives easier, but honestly I prefer the do-it-ourselves method. At least the workers were very clearly communicating about the boarding process, which is not common for Amtrak!

The hourlong ride north snuck us between the west side of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, on the narrow sliver of land that also carries I-55. At the quiet small-town station in Hammond, the baggage handlers were pleasantly surprised when we went directly to the baggage car to claim our bikes and bags as we normally do, so maybe they’ll start encouraging others to do the same?

We did a stock-up at Walmart on the west side of town while waiting for our AirBNB to become available, and then crossed back to the east side to settle into our nearly-rural home 2 miles from the train station at the center of town.

Days 2 to 20

The main reason for our time off in Hammond is to figure out what we want to do with our lives. The obvious question is “where to next?”, but deeper and more-important is “do we want to continue this nomadic bicycle-based life?”, which we will have been living for precisely 3.5 years when we depart Hammond. Faster than I expected, we concluded “yes”. But Rett’s recent struggles with heat and humidity has ruled out our one-time idea of riding west into Texas and south through Mexico and Central America. Instead, we will fly to the opposite end of the tropics, to Peru, and spend 7 or 8 months riding to the tip of South America. It sounds crazy and scary, but riding through Baja Mexico sounded crazy and scary when we did it three years ago, and it remains one of our favorite times, so our hope is that overcoming our fear will have similarly positive results.

But we need to wait for the rainy season in Peru to finish up, and while I did some work on our bikes here (replacing Rett’s rear 9-speed drivetrain with Shimano CUES 10-speed), I need to do a significant overhaul to prepare them for the rigors of gravel roads 15,000 feet up in the Andes. So once again we will be following the weather, heading upriver, north, to a big city with a lot of resources and a major airport: Chicago. Oh, and is that where Mom & Dad live too?

Given all the work and research, we didn’t do too much else during our stay. When we realized that the Amtrak line continues straight to Chicago, it made it easy for Rett’s sister to come down to visit for a week (this was before we realized we’d be heading to Chicago!) Our AirBNB is a not-walkable 2 miles outside of Hammond, but our generous host was just like “take my car to go pick your sister up!”

So it’s been a relaxing, easy stay, and it let me get caught up on these posts!