Tuesday was an eventful day. On our way to Austin Junction, we met another couple, Peter Furcht and Diane Sweeney. They had actually been married for years, but Diane had kept her last name. She mentioned being embarrassed at motels because their names weren’t the same.
Austin Junction turned out to be just a single store.
While we were having lunch there, who should come coasting in, but my friend Stewart Lee from California. Stewart and I had ridden to L.A. together before; now he was going transcontinental with two friends – at twice our pace. We chatted for a while, then parted, knowing that we probably wouldn’t see each other again for the rest of the trip.
Stewart’s highly entertaining trip report is HERE.
That day, we also met Jay, a P.E. teacher from Virginia who was touring with two of his students. Jay later earned a reputation as the horniest cyclist on the road. Good example for our young students.
While going up a hill, we saw a woman walking her bike. She wasn’t exactly fit-looking, and had about a hundred pounds of gear on her bike. At the campground, we met Letty. Her name was actually Maria Letticia Parra, a woman that had put an ad in BikeReport (the BikeCentennial magazine) looking for riding companions. I had responded to her ad previously, offering to team up, but I think my expected cost for the trip scared her off. She was used to traveling much more cheaply.
Letty was peculiar. She carried a huge tent on her bike, big enough for four, a coffeepot, stuffed toys, a pillow, several other cooking pots — even a tiny washing machine for her clothes. We later found out that she had originally brought even more gear than she had with her — she had mailed back forty pounds of stuff at the start. Instead of buying food in small quantities along the way, she went to a sporting goods store ahead of time, and bought her entire trip’s worth of food in freeze-dried meals. Then she had her sister mail it ahead to towns on the route. One’s immediate reaction might be to think that she was green as a frog, but in fact, she was a seasoned tourist, having logged thousands of miles previously on a loop of the United States.
We had lunch at Austin Junction.
Two companions, Alan and Stephanie, had started out with Letty for the first few days, but later decided to move faster.
“Oh,” I remarked to Stephanie, “is Alan your husband?”
“NO!” she shouted emphatically, with that tone of ‘How could you possibly even suggest that?’
Steph was the darling of the road. News of her spread far and wide along the trail. A charming and attractive girl in her early twenties, she was exactly what one would expect of a Blue Ridge mountain maid (although, in truth, she lived and worked in town). Stephanie Robinson carried only one change of clothes, no stove, no cooking utensils, and no food. She just ate wherever she stopped. If there was no food where she stopped, she simply didn’t eat. Her budget was about $5 a day, which was more than adequate for one so tough. Besides, who could resist those enchanting green eyes? I suspected that she got many unsolicited handouts– I did, and I wasn’t half as cute.
I took no picture of Stephanie that day, but she appears in later posts.