49.6 mi / 12.9 mph / 385 ft. climbing
Home: EconoLodge

We left the rainfly off the tent for our second camping night in a row, and suffered no ill-effects. Amazing! Though despite the 62-degree temperature and everything being dry, it still somehow took us nearly three hours to go from alarm to rolling. Traffic was still busy on the causeway road that took us back across the reservoir to the Trace, but somehow all the drivers seemed much more relaxed and patient in the morning than they had been last afternoon.

Back on the Natchez Trace, traffic was 3x higher than our first day, but 3x lower than yesterday’s Jackson traversal, and despite being in the middle, the feeling was closer to the first day. A big difference was that Mississippi’s hills seem to be flattening out. That, or it’s just because the Trace follows the Pearl/Yockanookany Rivers upstream in this section; I guess we’ll find out more with our next ride!

At lunch we spent some time figuring out a plan for the upcoming rains. After tonight, we’ll need two days to get anywhere that has a roof, and while the is still frustratingly-little agreement between the weather models, it’s fairly clear that there isn’t a two-day window of fair weather. So we’ll stay in Kosciuscko for three nights waiting for that window to open, and then hopefully dash on to Oxford before it closes again.

I’m a little bummed because Kosciuscko is one of the three spots on the Trace that offers free bicycle-only camping, and we thought of camping for the first night and then walking literally across the street to the EconoLodge for the next two nights, but decided it would just be more restful to go straight to the motel.

After checking into our nice large motel room, I ran out to Walmart where I encountered yet another checkout person utterly baffled by my request to skip the bagging process. My motivation isn’t even mainly for environmental reasons (because really, plastic bags are pretty small-potatoes in anyone’s environmental footprint), it’s because I need to repack everything into my panniers anyway, so their bags are really more hassle than benefit. “But, how will you get your stuff out?!” Uh, I’ll just put everything right back into this cart and then put it in my panniers and then wheel my bike inside, steps from my fridge and “pantry”. But she was maybe indicating that it had something to do with their security process, so I relented and just let her do her thing. It was the same at the Piggly Wiggly in Hammond, where, after I finally convinced them to skip the bags, they insisted on putting a sticker on every single item. Even though it was literally 20 steps to the door and my bike.

For months we’ve been in states where they are happy to hand out bags willy-nilly, but they at least appeared to have awareness that different methods exist and are possible. But now we seem to be in a region so completely isolated from no-disposable-bag laws that they can’t even conceive of that universe, so it apparently short-circuits their brains to even suggest it. Though I quickly realized that I should have fought harder, because she proceeded to use one bag per item!? (I repacked into a much smaller number of bags as I pulled them off the carousel.)

We went to a Mexican restaurant next door for our first night’s dinner, and over a pitcher of margaritas, had fun reading each other Wikipedia entries about the strange non-Polish way they pronounce “Kosciusko” here in this extremely non-Polish place, about Oprah (who was born here in poverty before migrating north and becoming the wealthiest black person in the world), and about the Great Northward Migration, when people like Oprah’s mother, feeling unwelcome in the South, took their skills, their labor, and their drive elsewhere for the chance at a better life, while the remaining whites eventually realized all they were losing, and stemmed the flow by ending their bigotry. Haha, no, that last part is a lie. Yes, the white leaders did realize the harm their bigotry was causing to themselves, but rather than saying “maybe we should just stop being assholes?”, they began to use coercion to keep blacks from leaving! Learning this, I feel like we’re not far away once again from history rhyming, in the stupidest way possible. Anyway, just some deep thoughts in this Deep South town named to honor a Polish immigrant, fueled by margaritas served to us by Mexican immigrants.