Last night Kurt checked the weather to find that we should expect rain Friday. Lots of rain. 1-2″ of rain. That’s a problem. More so than usual. Because Thursday night is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. I’d planned to wild camp, but waking to sheeting rain is … suboptimal. Especially when I’m supposed to be in a swamp nature reserve next to a river. With flood warnings. We tossed that back and forth late into the night with no resolution for me.
Kurt’s and my paths diverge tomorrow. In part because he wanted to spend a few hours in Baton Rouge. To get that time, and still cover distance, he’s boosting his speed e-bike style. And then make a large jump Thursday the same way.
We ate together, and I headed out with a variety of options. Even so, I ended up elsewhere. Many heavy traffic roads today, but (mostly) wide shoulders. I had lunch at a lovely city park in Baton Rouge. I made a few failed attempts at finding a supermarket before randomly finding one on the side of the road.
I’d decided to make (another) big jump today to Jim’s Campground, to position myself for an even longer day on Thurs. At the 100 km mark I reached the turnoff for the campground, 12 km off the road. UGG. That would be 12 km more today, but more importantly add 12 km to an already horribly long day tomorrow. No other choices in OSMAnd or Google. While dealing with AirBnB login problems, I checked iOverlander, a tool primarily used to flag wild/free RV and camping sites, and found an RV park 25 km away. In the right direction. That hadn’t been visited since 2019 (pre-Covid). More searching found a phone number and friendly hostess, and I made it with no additional difficulty (beyond that of 124 km, a long way even on my Istanbul trip of 16 weeks).
I had tailwinds a good portion of the day, which helped offset the lack of drafting behind Kurt. I worked at keeping my speed low to not wear myself out, which appears to have worked! 124 km.
But tomorrow I have to make an almost identical distance if I want to get to a hotel to hunker down for a day. Will see what tomorrow brings.
I encounter a pair of cyclists today riding from Texas to Florida. They’d never heard of going N/S. And the host at the RV site asked if I had started in San Diego or Florida. Apparently I’m at a crossroads!