58.9 mi / 10.8 mph / 1903 ft. climbing
Home: Jimin’s AirBNB

We had a big day for the final segment of our 8-month sojourn of the eastern half of the United States. Beginning last August near Syracuse, a city in New York named after a major center of the ancient world, we coincidentally are ending in Memphis, a city in Tennessee named after another major center of the ancient world. And while nothing in the United States comes close to the cultural histories of those Mediterranean cities, our route did take us through many of the most-historic parts of our own nation: New York City, Massachusetts, Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, and New Orleans. What a pleasant surprise to have a believable theme emerge from our 4000-mile wandering!

We again crossed back and forth over MS-7, still able to use the old highway to avoid all but the briefest segments on the new one. We turned west at Holly Springs, I think the first all-Black (well, 80%) rural small town we’ve ever been through. I would not have even noticed if not for the local election signs featuring exclusively Black candidates.

The cycling heat maps around Memphis show an unusually-concentrated river of activity flowing east-southeast from downtown, and out toward the suburbs of Germantown and Collierville. Outside of that zone, there is essentially zero recorded cycling activity, particularly if entering Memphis from the south. This is one of the strangest patterns I’ve seen around any city, but when I looked up a demographic map, I cannot say that I was shocked to see that the “map of white neighborhoods” had an almost-perfect correlation with “map of cycling activity”.

One measure lists Memphis as the 4th-most-segregated metro in the US (with our next destination of Chicago coming in at #2, yay?) So I felt a bit of shame that we were perpetuating that divide by entering the city by way of the White River. In Mississippi we learned that there was little correlation between the cycling heatmaps and ride quality, and the same might be true for the Black neighborhoods south of Memphis. We perhaps made up for it a bit by the fact that our AirBNB unintentionally ended up in one of the rare neighborhoods with a near-equal mix of white and black residents (the aptly-named “Crosstown”).

But what makes me feel even worse is the positive impression of the city that we felt from my chosen route. Much of it reminded me of Cleveland (uh…#5 on that segregation list): a place that had struggled for so long that a full-on rebirth had become possible, but a rebirth onto the skeleton of quality 150-year-old bones that had built up the city in the first place.

Days 2-7

We had originally booked four nights in Memphis, but then got a message from Amtrak that our train to Chicago had been canceled. The week of rain that had kept us sheltered to the south in Oxford was again the culprit here: the 10-15 inches that came down north of Memphis had put the tracks underwater in several places, and in fact there would be a 10-day stretch where no trains would run north to Illinois. We were able to get rebooked on the second train after the restart, which at first seemed quite lucky, but then I realized that for most people, 10 days of cancellations means they just never make the trip to Chicago. Because the thing they were going to had long since passed, or their time off work couldn’t be adjusted, etc. We’re the rare customers for whom it makes sense to say “yeah, we still want to take that train, no big deal if it’s 10 days later that we’d planned”. Still, that meant we needed to (got to?) stay for three more nights in Memphis, and while we could extend our AirBNB for one more night, it meant we would need to move to another one (run by the same host) for the last two nights.

But the move was good, because it “forced” us back out into the streets of Memphis. To kill time between checkout and check-in, we headed over to Cooper House Project, a brewery specializing in Rett Beers. But on the way, we snuck our bikes through a closed-off section of streets, clearly preparation for a street fest. So when we finished our beers, we headed back to check out Huey’s 55th Anniversary Block Party, thrown by a much-loved burger joint. There we watched some of the stalwarts of Memphis’s music scene, and talked with a couple of cool locals (our fully-loaded bikes sitting in the middle of the street were a good conversation starter). One, a hippie outdoorsman, tipped us off to the cheap beers we could get at the liquor store just outside the fest, and the other, a onetime president of the Blues Foundation, actually bought us beers! (and shared his contact info in case we meet in Chile this holiday season). So it was an unexpected way for us to feel a bit more integrated into the culture of Memphis. And Tennessee, our 31st US State!