41.8 mi / 12.2 mph / 182 ft. climbing
Home: Driftin Sands Motel

Steady and unchanging, or rising and falling. Two different ways to get from Point A to Point B, either literally across the surface of our planet, or metaphorically, across the surface of our lives. In terms of our personalities, I’ve always been the steady one, while Rett swings both higher and lower than me (though I feel our amplitudes have each converged towards the other as our relationship has lengthened).

Last night the temperature was 65 degrees at sunset, and at the coldest point of this morning, just before sunrise, it had dropped to…62. Last night’s winds which had blown continuously no slower than 12mph and no faster than 15mph, were still blowing, at 12-15mph. And across the last 3 days’ 150 miles, the road has risen and fallen less than 700 feet, most of that over bridges. That’s as close to “flat” as we’ve ever rolled.

It’s as if we’re in a fable where the Earth has said “you think you like steady and unchanging? Well I’ll feed you nothing but steady and unchanging then!”

Of course there are reasons to like the steadiness. Never getting too cold in camp nor too hot when riding is delightful (though for me I wouldn’t argue with bumping up both the high and low by 5 degrees). When the winds are behind us (as they generally have been), it’s so much easier to cover ground, and recent days have shown a steady, lighter wind can be more helpful than a stronger, variable wind. And never needing to strain and push up a hill is, well… actually not all that great.

Most obviously, no uphills mean that we never get downhills either. But the uphills have benefits of their own; even though our gears hide much change from our bodies, it’s still impossible not to engage our muscles differently, and, the increased intensity with which we push on the pedals takes some of our body weight off of our hands. We’re both finding more numbness and discomfort in our hands because they’re never getting those uphill breaks. We could “simulate” uphills by choosing to increase our pedaling intensity for intervals, but only psychos would do that to themselves on a flat, steady road.

Are there similar benefits hidden in emotional ups and downs as well? No doubt!

The majority of today’s ride was on US 158, a broad highway with two lanes in each direction and narrow shoulders, but a left-turn median running its entire length (that buffer was helpful to make it easier for traffic to move over as it passes us, but also strange when the dual left-turn arrows would be painted in the center of a miles-long stretch where trees or fields were the only things to turn left into). On this Sunday morning, there were at least 10 cars leaving the Outer Banks for every one that was heading our way. If the situation had been reversed, it could have been a very stressful ride, but thankfully it was pretty relaxed for us.

Today Rett was feeling unusually low-energy, but I couldn’t detect that from her output. My theory is that the lack of variability is mentally draining to her, and those effects bleed into her body. We made a relatively-early stop at McDonald’s, and that helped as it usually does.

Somehow it made the traffic worse though. Much more of it was heading our way, and we had the shoulderless Wright Memorial Bridge to cross. Additionally the 90-degree turn onto the bridge would convert our mostly-tailwind into a mostly-headwind. In practice, the winds had suddenly shown some variability and lightened considerably, and the perfectly-straight and flat bridge gave cars plenty of time to see us and merge into the left lane before they passed. So the biggest problem was again the steadiness: with no place to pause on the three-mile span, Rett was shaking the discomfort out of her right hand every 20 seconds.

And then we were in the Outer Banks! Rather than heading straight for the ocean, we took The Woods Road south (this is a rare place on the Outer Banks where the land is wide enough to accommodate more than one north-south road). A short section of bike trail ended with the steepest (though obviously short) climb we’ve had in days.

I’d been hoping to camp at a WamShowers host on the mainland side of the bridge for a 31-mile day, but we never heard back from him until today at lunch, by which point I’d already booked a motel room 10 miles further. There had been another private campground only a little past that, but off-season non-weekend meant we could get a perfect-for-us room for $62 (less than we paid for camping on Martha’s Vineyard!), so we’re actually glad the WarmShowers didn’t work out.

Day 2

After nearly 200 miles in the last 4 days, the good rate inspired our first do-nothing day off on our own in two weeks.