It doesn’t show up very well in this picture but it is pouring rain. Last night about midnight it started raining hard and rained all night long. About 2 am our tent started leaking water and by morning much of what was in it was wet. I am thinking, “I really don’t want to ride in this stuff all day” so I google “closest cheap motel” and 7.4 miles away right on our route was one for $65 a night. We had a little bicycle council meeting amoung us all, and decided to take another rest day at this motel. We called and they had enough rooms and “yes” we could check in at 9 am instead of waiting until 3 pm. So now we have stuff hung up all over our motel room with the heat turned up and the fan on high trying to dry everything out. We will take it across the street to the laundry mat if it isn’t dry by 3 pm. This is our first rain storm of the trip. I thought for awhile we might make it without one but what would a bicycle trip be without a rain storm.  The weather report for tomorrow is for rain but not heavy rain so we will bicycle tomorrow for sure.

Crossed from Mississippi into Alabama today. Tomorrow we will enter into Florida and have about a weeks worth of riding left and then we will be home. I am anxious to get home and back to work  and see everyone, but there is a bit of melancholy sadness as well of the thought of the trip being over. It is a simple life, riding your bicycle all day enjoying the scenery, thinking, and then camping. The sadness I think comes from recognizing how busy and complicated normal life is and we are about to jump back into it again.

Today we rode our bicycles along the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi and in Alabama. There was a lot of wind coming off of the water so it was mostly a side wind from the South as we rode East and was a bit of a nuisance but not bad. We saw quite a few Armidillos that had been hit by cars but most were squashed to bad to take a picture of, but this one was in good shape so I drug it out of the road amidst traffic and had John take a picture of us, me and Mr. Armidillo. We rode about 75 miles today and tonight we are camped in the yard of a warm shower host. They fed us dinner of genuine Southern cooking, with collard greens, corn bread, red beans and rice with sausage, and sweet potatoes.

This picture is at the start of our bicycle trip across the nation from San Diego to St Augustine, Florida. The bike I am standing behind is a recumbent trike that I built with help from friends to replace the normal 2 wheeled bicycle I had been riding for the last several years. The reason for the change was primarily because it is way more comfortable and because of the three wheels I didn’t have to worry about balance and falling over. I was quite excited about it. One week into the trip I took the trike apart and strapped it to the top of the camper, and bought a Trek touring bicycle to finish the trip on. The absence of shoulders on the road, which required riding out in the road and traffic,  the difficulty of straddling rumble strips which also required riding out in the road, and the slowness of climbing hills frustrated me to the point of making this adjustment away from what I had hoped would work. The bicycle has been working great and I have also adjusted to and overcome the butt pain, neck pain, and hand pain that is generally part of riding a regular two wheeled bicycle. In life successful people have learned how to make adjustments in order to accomplish their goals. They aren’t wimpy, quitters who are inconsistent or unreliable, but they have acquired the wisdom to know when to adjust, make the decision quickly, and then to persevere in the new direction without to much second guessing about the change.  The most important area of life to make adjustments in is in relationships with people. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament said, “I have become all things to all people in order that I might win some, to the Jews I live like a Jew and to the Gentles like a Gentile”. In another passage he says, “So far as it depends on you be at peace with all men” or put in another way, “work hard at getting along with anybody and everybody” . On this trip we have met all kinds of people, with all kinds of personalities, and all kinds of opinions. It would be very easy to fight with and argue with most of them. In our world today there is a lot of fighting. In our government there is a lot of fighting. In our families there is a lot of fighting. There is a point that taking a stand on something is necessary, stating our opinion on what we think is right and true, but most often wisely making adjustments and practicing deference will result in much greater change. Leaders make a difference in the world because they know how to influence people, and you influence those people that you treat well, are nice to, honor and respect, and adjust to with patience.

We entered into Mississippi today. We started February 28th at San Diego, California, went into Arizona, then New Mexico, and then spent 15 days getting through Texas, then Louisiana and now Mississippi. For the first half of the trip it was cactus and sand, and now it is very green and beautiful fields and trees. Now that we have moved away from the Mississippi River the bug population has dropped considerably. I only need to put bug repellent on in the evening as we sit around outside after it cools off. Today was a super nice day of riding. Very nice weather, no wind, and most of the time little traffic on back country roads.  We rode about 70 miles today. Tomorrow is Sunday and we are going to take the day off and sit around camp and eat, sleep, and read. I need to do some adjusting on my shifters, clean and oil my chain, and do a few other minor repairs on my bike. We are in a nice campground tonight next to a creek. The last three nights we have slept in a Sea Food restaurant, a church, and a police station. The nice thing about those is they were free!! So far we have ridden in the rain for a total of 2 hours, and from the extended forcast we might make it all the way without major rain, yahoo!! So far I have had no flat tires!!

This blog is especially for those of you who have been faithfully praying for my health. Most of you know that one of the reasons for the bicycle trip is that I have read and found by experience that bicycle riding helps my Parkinson’s. I ride a stationary bike at home for 30 to 60 minutes most days and that helps, but the 6 to 10 hours a day that we are riding on this trip has helped a lot. There are a number of issues with Parkinson’s, but  there are three that bother me most. The worst is the 24/7 fatigue and weariness that I now experience. I work at ignoring it and doing what I need to do in spite of how I feel, and taking 15 minute power naps during the day. My natural energy level has always been a major plus for me in my life and ministry and now that is mostly gone. A second and similar issue is depression. It really isn’t depression but a lack of desire or motivation to do anything, just sort of a flatness. Again the natural passion, vision, and fire that has been in me all of my life  has always been a major strength in my leadership at the church and in my ministry. Now I use “to do” lists and goals  to motivate myself even more than I have in the past, and work hard at developing the character trait of self control so I do what I know I need to do even if I am not excited about doing it. The third issue is the muscle stiffness and pain that wears on me and contributes to the first two problems of weariness and being unmotivated. Today as I was riding along the road I thought “I haven’t felt this good for awhile”. When I say “feel good” I am talking about my energy, joy, enthusiasm, passion, and even the muscle stiffness and pain is mostly gone. It really is quite significant the change that I have experienced over the last month. I am not totally where I was 5 years ago, but close I think. I am determined to make the exercise bike even more a part of my life than it has been when we get back home, and work at riding my bicycle outside as much as I can. Thank you so much to all of you who have been faithfully praying for me.

Here is the huge bridge that we rode our bicycles over as we crossed the Mississippi River yesterday. In this lower part of Louisiana there is water all over the place in the form of bayous or swamps, rivers and streams and in the ditches, because of the rain but also because the Mississippi has so many tributaries that run out of it and wander around then go back into it again. The result is lots of bugs. Several weeks ago I wrote about the things that bicycle riders hate such as rumble strips, chip seal roads with 1 inch minus gravel, and head winds, but now there is a new number one thing that I hate, and that is bugs. Yesterday we made super good time because every time we stopped to take a break the bugs would swarm around us and make it impossible to rest more than a minute. They aren’t misquotes but these little pesky black flies. They seem to like DEET, their favorite thing is to fly into my ears, nose, and eyes, and I am constantly breathing them in while I ride and then coughing and choking  for the next mile. Hopefully as we move away from the Mississippi the bug numbers will go down.

I still occasionally fall over on my bicycle because I forget to unclip my feet from the pedals of my bike before I stop. We are staying in a church tonight and as we rode into the parking lot I was looking around at the buildings and admiring them thinking about what this church was like. I pulled up to where John and Richard were and stopped, and as I started to go over like a chopped tree I thought, “whoops”! John took my picture before I could get up. It does hurt like the dickens, but I wasn’t going to say that, just laugh and rub my knee and elbow like crazy to get the pain to go away. We rode 60 miles today through farm ground of Louisiana and it was awesome. I didn’t know that they raised sugar cane anywhere  in the lower 48 States, but we saw thousands of acres of it today. We saw a dead alligator that was about 6 feet long by the road that someone had evidently hit with a car, a dead armadillo, lots of very big frogs, turtles, and more snakes. As I said earlier we are staying in 1st Baptist Church of St Francisville, Louisiana. Patty and I have our pads and sleeping bags in what they call their “Family Center”. Tomorrow we are riding almost 90 miles and we will be staying at the Police Center in Franklinton. We get to sleep in the interrogation room!!

Tonight we are staying at a Cayjan Restaurant in Louisiana. Patty and I are going to sleep on our pads in the Resturant between the tables  after it closes at 9 pm. The others are sleeping in the camper and tear drop trailer parked behind the Restaurant. For dinner I had a cultural Louisiana experience by eating locally grown crawfish. I asked our host what a local would eat and he said at least 5 pounds so I said OK, and here they are. I was still eating after everyone else had long finished their dinners. Our host and his wife are very hospitable and it has been a very enjoyable experience staying here with them. A major part of the fun of a trip like this is all the people we get to meet and talk to. The bicycle trip prompts lots of questions and conversations with people. We had another very enjoyable day of riding our bicycles. The weather was sunny and not to hot, the wind was minimal with a few hours of a tail wind, the terrain was mostly flat, and the scenery was beautiful. We are in the area of Louisiana that has lots of bayous with trees growing in the water with lots of turtles and snakes. I looked for alligators but didn’t see any. We only rode 46 miles today which felt nice and tomorrow we will go around 60 miles. We will cross the Mississippi River tomorrow and cross out of Louisiana into the state of Mississippi.  We are sleeping in a church tomorrow night.

As we pedaled our bicycles through Louisiana today we saw hundreds of acres of rice fields similar to the kind you see North of Sacramento along I-5 if you have driven there. As we were riding along we saw rows of small wire cages in the water that floods the rice fields and we were curious what they were. John said, “I wonder if they grow Crawfish in the water” because they sort of looked like a crawfish or crawdad traps. Crawfish is the big deal here in the restaurants and signs everywhere advertise them for sale. When we got to camp I Googled rice growing techniques in Louisiana and discovered “sure enough” Louisiana grows 90% of the Crawfish in the USA, and they grow them in the rice fields after the rice has been harvested and the fields re-flooded. The crawfish grow very large because of all the rice stubble and biomass in the field left from the rice production and are like miniature lobsters. Tomorrow night we are camping in the backyard of a “Cayjan Resturant” whose owner likes bicycle riders, and let’s them stay at his Resturant. I am going to have a big pile of Louisiana Crawfish which they specialize in. On our last Bicycle trip when we rode to Portland, Maine across the Northern part of the US we had lobster in Maine to celebrate our finish. I will call my dinner tomorrow night an early celebration for completing the trip to St Augustine, Florida. We rode 85 miles today and it was a very nice day of riding. There was very little wind, the route today was almost totally flat and there were lots of things to see. We saw numerous big turtles crossing the rode, 6 to 10 inches in diameter, lots of snakes in the ditches along the road, some of them very large, all kinds of birds, plus all the small towns that we rode through with all their culture.