52.8 mi / 11.8 mph / 1131 ft. climbing
Home: John’s AirBNB

Rett was surprised by a man in the women’s restroom when we went over for our morning relief. When he emerged, his water bottle identified him as the other bike tourer who had arrived in camp last night (yet we hadn’t seen). Since the men’s toilet remained full to the brim with a malignant brown stew (as it had been yesterday), his alternate approach was completely understandable, and in fact what I had been considering myself (I ended up riding back up to the bathrooms at the top of the mountain, for the view, the privacy, and, since our later schedule might have been impacting more female customers).

Anyway, we had a good chat outside the toilet: he’s an experienced ~70-year-old from Colorado who has ridden in many places that we have, and had been planning on New Zealand this winter until time slipped away, so was doing the Trace (for the first time in 25 years) as an alternate. He then stopped by our site twice more before he rolled out, clearly just as excited as us to find others of his own kind (he’s the first bike tourer we’ve talked with since Key West!)

The Trace continued to be pleasant and pretty, but on our sixth and final day, there was some evidence that both of us were being lulled to sleep by the consistency. Rett literally felt like she was falling asleep while riding (a first for her, necessitating a sugar break), and I found myself once again counting overtaking cars like sheep. My brain speaking to itself: “Number 8…. Number 9… and we’ve just crossed mile 8, so if we can go one more mile without another car passing us, we’ll reach my (meaningless! arbitrary!) goal of 1-car-per-mile…and if we can make a mile after that, we’ll have ‘money in the bank’ to ‘pay’ for a future car! Ah, crap, there’s Number 10 in my mirror…. And now Number 11! Now we’re deep in debt and have to go three miles without a car passing to dig ourselves out!” As someone who derives a lot of positive emotion from building up surpluses (money, free time, etc.), it was genuinely bumming me out that we would get close to getting out of (meaningless!) “debt”, only to have a group of three cars drive by like assholes just put us in a hole again. Thankfully traffic eventually increased a bit to permanently put my stupid goal completely out-of-reach, but that’s what it took for me to finally let it go. Even for someone with unusually stable emotions, apparently when there is no drama, I need to invent some!

At lunch we dealt with a bit more drama, not entirely-invented, but apparently only felt from our side. I had booked an AirBNB yesterday, and (unusually) received zero communication from our host in response to our booking. I had sent a message an hour earlier, and still gotten no response, so now with only a few hours until check-in time, we needed to know if we had to change our route/destination (given how many AirBNBs we’ve booked, it wouldn’t be crazy to finally hit one where the host had a heart attack the day before and was unconscious in a hospital!) He had a phone number listed, so Rett called but got voicemail (supporting the heart attack theory!) But then a couple minutes later he called back, and seemed surprised that we were frustrated. Anyway, door was unlocked with the key on the table, so I guess in an extremely small town like New Houlka, that’s just how they do things, and he doesn’t know anything different.

Six miles later we finally said goodbye to the Natchez Trace Parkway for the last time. Rett had been willing to add a couple miles on our already-long day to keep us on it longer vs. taking a busier road, and immediately had to fend off two dog-chases. Welcome back to Mississippi! (…from a strange linear enclave that runs across most of Mississippi without quite being in Mississippi.) We also got blazed by on the country road by a couple of young bucks who weren’t nearly as relaxed as the vast majority of drivers in Mississippi (whether on or off the Trace).

In Houston we got on the Tanglefoot Trail to take us due north. At the edge of town we passed some extremely-long, low-slung buildings backed up against the former railroad; it seemed doubtful that the town would allow smelly chicken barns so close, and yeah, apparently they’re mostly part of Franklin Furniture, a maker of recliners that I’ve never heard of, who must be a huge part of Houston’s economy. Not surprisingly, we didn’t encounter any of the employees bike-commuting on the trail, and saw zero cyclists at all over the 10 miles to New Houlka (we did pass two walkers).

We picked up a frozen pizza and other groceries in New Houlka, and then rode the a half mile back out into the country to our AirBNB, and it immediately became clear why it was so highly-rated despite the poor communication. “The Deer Lodge” sits inside the “hole” of a beautiful donut, where the donut itself is rolling cattle pasture sprinkled with green and yellow and trees. We bumped our tires over a cattle guard to enter the property, and followed the gravel drive over the donut to a half-acre fenced section in the center. Except there was no gate on the big opening in the fence, so what is the point? Ah! It’s guarded by the matching cattle guard, so rolling across it returned us to “safety”, a small island in the middle of the pasture.

Oh, and in addition to the curious cattle, the house was surrounded by purple wisteria vines as tall as the trees that they encircled. It was a perfect country retreat, and it would have been a wonderful place to spend a week at, especially at the super-low ~$100/night rate. I investigated if the weather would allow us to stay another night (and take a bit of load off Sophie and Ethan, our hosts who will be sheltering us from the upcoming storm), and it was a close thing, but we decided that the small risk of severe storms two days from now was a bigger concern than the high winds of tomorrow.