March 24: Marianna to Tallahassee, FL

Thanks to our intrepid mapmaker, Andy Anderson, we stitched a teeny jog into our route this morning to bag one more state: Georgia.  After crossing the Apalachicola River, we veered north a mile into Georgia for a snack and strip of warm morning clothes before retracing our steps back to our beloved Hwy 90 and eastward through Florida’s panhandle.

The Apalachicola River looking northward into Georgia.

From our sag stop we zipped along quiet roads in packs of four or five to Quincy, the county seat of Gadsden County, named after James Gadsden of the Gadsden Purchase.  The streets of Quincy are lined with southern-style wood painted houses with large front and wrap-around porches decked with swings and wicker chairs.  These are porches that are actually used – considered another room of the house.  And it makes sense to have a porch; it was 70 degrees today and with this much humidity, it felt just on the cusp of hot and muggy; another couple of degrees and a person would want to live outside all the time hoping for a little breeze to cool them off.

Front to rear: Gary, Leslie, Bob, and Julia spin along together on the way to Quincy.

The first blooms and buds of trees in front of a Quincy, Florida home.

After lunch, we saw the less fortunate side of life: peeling houses with worn out paint faded by unattended years of sun and rain, listing roofs with sparse patches of shingles, even a blanket for a front door on one house, and loads and loads of garbage, old cars, and chairs strewn around the yards.  It felt like the deep poverty you read about sometimes of various parts of the deep south.

It’s warm and muggy today, a 70-mile day after 107 yesterday.  People seem to be saving strength for tomorrow’s very long (113 mile) day.  More and more iPods have appeared in rider’s ears, like a musical meditation spinning along mostly quiet roads.  The favorite music reported so far is: Grateful Dead, The Who, and the Talking Heads (Rich), Emma Shapplin singing an operatic Carmen Meo plus, of course, anything Mark Knopfler (Julia), whatever comes out of the download he got from his friend which shifts unpredictably from jazz to a talk on Shakespeare (Alan Feiger), a variety of things (Marcella), and mostly pop (Mark Lestikow). 

There’s some debate about the safety of riding with iPods; some people ride with only one bud in an ear, others rely on rear-view mirrors, and many don’t use them at all; but the right music over these long distances does imbue the ride with a mythic quality.  It inspires a quicker climb up a steep hill, creates a steady rhythm and cadence to your stroke, pops the whole experience into a fourth dimension.   Plus, if your days at home are pretty full, it’s a chance to spend much of a day listening to some of your favorite music.  Just remember to take the buds out when you get into traffic.