Into Louisiana

The breakfast at the Best Value was one of the best hotel breakfasts I've ever had. The biscuits and gravy, sausage, scrambled eggs, grits, and muffins were all hot and fresh, and I stuffed myself. I probably would have filled my pockets with biscuits too had the clerk not been standing in the doorway gossipping with a friend.

The more hotels I stay in, the less sense their ratings and prices make to me. At the Marriott in Phildelphia, we were paying $100/night, and there was no breakfast at all, not even cereal. There was a Starbucks in the lobby that charged $10 for a plate of eggs, so we walked to the Wawa across the street.

At the Holiday Inn Express, supposedly a step down from the Marriott, breakfast is pretty good. And at the Best Value, which was theoretically shoddy (and I admit their laundry facilities left a certain lingering stink in my clothing), the breakfast was downright excellent.

It was pouring down rain again as we packed up. We waited out the worst of the monsoon but couldn't sit around all day, so our journey began in the rain. The worst of it was fortunately over by the time Rogue fell suddenly far behind on the highway. She caught up again, then fell behind, then rode up very close to me. I gave her an inquisitive thumbs-up, which she did not return. We pulled onto the shoulder and I watched as she fidgeted with her handlebars, poked at this and that, revved her engine, and finally shook her head vehemently and stepped off Zee.

"What's up?" I asked.

"My grip is loose," she said. "It's spinning."

"Can you make it to the next exit? It's a mile." She nodded and led the way to the nearest gas station.

They didn't sell super glue, but the dollar store down the street did. I retrieved some and we had a short break while it dried.

In Vicksburg we took a short detour, looking for a lunch we didn't actually find. I rode into town a little ways and pondered how much I dislike ghost towns. We've found a remarkable number of places that seem to contain fewer people than they should, hanging onto the memories of closed businesses and watching through torn holes in faded curtains. Somehow I'm always waiting for someone to demand that I explain my presence there, like a kid caught spying on the neighbors.

The rain stayed away, and eventually we fetched up on the shores of Caney Lake in Kisatchie National Forest in Minden, Louisiana. The Turtle Slide campground was closed, but the one adjacent to it was open, and had water and electrical hookups and showers. We were unable to start a fire with all the wet branches and more rain was predicted overnight. Our tent has been pretty good, but I'll always opt for more weatherproofing when possible, so we used the lantern hook to suspend the tarp over the tent.

My Kindle was gone, of course, but Rogue had put some episodes of a podcast called Welcome to Nightvale on her MP3 player and I had a speaker. We lay in the tent in the dark and let Cecil lull us to sleep with odd stories from a strange desert town.

I81 Is Even Better in the Rain

Rogue took a ride around the campground to test Hades' rear tire, and said she seemed okay. Once she was parked again, however, the root of the problem became clear as a slick of oil emerged from underneath the bike and decorated the pavement with rainbows.

"You're oiling your own tire," I said. "That explains a lot."

Rogue checked the drain plug and found it to be satisfactorily tight. The level of hazard the bike now presented was something we didn't want to play with on the twisty, hilly parkway. We decided to jump the mountains again, get back on I81, and run for it.

I backed Bee carefully around the puddles of engine barf, Rogue guiding me, and we took off. Routes 221 and 194 allowed us to admire some quaint mountain towns such as Minneapolis, and by the time 19E landed us back on 81, the air was dry again. I folded up my rain suit and we headed for a Bo Jangles.

I'm not usually a fan of fast food. The big M and other such places don't have anything I consider "food," although I've been known to wolf down an occasional carton of fries. Bo Jangles, however, won my tastebuds over with their crispy, juicy fried chicken. The closest Bo to home is nearly 450 miles, so I wanted a fix while it was practical.

By the time we were finished eating, the rain had found us again. Riding 81 north toward Strasburg, Virginia, we encountered a traffic jam and hopped in the breakdown lane. Eleven miles later it cleared up at the spot where a car carrier had gone off the road. Rain or no rain, I was glad to be on a bike; the cars parked on the highway would probably be there for hours yet.

At a small gas station I pulled out a package of crackers to snack on and promptly spilled them all over the ground. Hungry and unwilling to waste food, I picked them up off the pavement and stuffed them in my face.

"You must be cold," I said to Rogue, who wasn't wearing rain gear. I'd given her my old suit but it didn't fit her well, and she had opted to ride without it.

"A bit," she acknowledged.

"You sure you still want to camp tonight?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Getting a hotel feels like cheating."

"It's not cheating," I said, "It's smart. You weren't prepared for this weather and I don't want you to freeze." My own rain suit, purchased recently after the spectacular failure of my last one in Nebraska, was keeping me snug and cozy, but I was all too familiar with the bone-chilling cold that comes from a long ride in the rain. Had it been me without the suit, I would've said screw camping.

"Okay," Rogue relented, and I started Googling lodging.

We rode well past dark and ended up at a Scottish Inns in Front Royal. Fifty dollars got us a hell of a lot more in Louisiana than it did in Virginia. Our door unlocked with a physical key, and it opened onto a poorly-lit room straight out of 1970. The walls had been patched with metal plating, where they had been patched at all, and the bathroom countertop listed to one side like a frat boy on Friday night.

There was no laundry, so we hung our clothes on the air conditioner, the TV, and the doorknob. Rogue unpacked the soaking-wet tent and hung it in the shower, where it dropped a forest's worth of leaves and dirt.

While she warmed up in bed, I walked across the street to Osteria 510, a beautifully appointed Italian restaurant and bar. I was the only customer, so I ordered a glass of wine and chatted with the owner while I waited for my takeout. Once upon a time he had owned a restaurant in Washington, but the late nights got to be too much, so he moved his business to Front Royal. He explained that most residents of Front Royal are Washington commuters, so they eat dinner early and then go home, allowing him to close at 10.

Owner of Osteria; photo credit unknown.

I'd told Rogue I was going to the gas station to find food, which was my plan until I saw the restaurant. When I returned to the room with a plastic bag smelling of fresh tomato sauce, she sat up straight.

"What'd you get?" she asked excitedly.

The butternut ravioli and tiramisu were a hit with both of us, the perfect finish to a nasty, wet day. I'd happily pause my next trip to go back to Osteria.

Booted from Baton Rouge

Back at Farr Park, Rogue rolled out the tent while I cooked dinner. Without much intention we had divided the tasks that way every morning and night, and it seemed to work well as long as I wasn't setting things on fire that shouldn't be. A man emerged from the motorhome next to us and said hello, and we got to talking about road life.

As the sun sank into the horizon, dusty rays came through the trees and shone on the bikes and on the picnic table. Rogue paused her setup to take some pictures, raving about our excellent timing.

Just as the rice was about ready to eat and the sleeping bags were unfurled, an SUV drove up in front of us and a woman got out.

"You have to leave," she told us. "We can't have tents here. I'm sorry to be the messenger, but my boss just told me to make sure you guys get out of here."

I strolled over. "There aren't any other campgrounds in the area," I said. "That's why we're here. You know of anyplace else we can go?"

She pulled out her phone and ran a search, and seemed to find the same results I had. "You're right," she said. "There aren't any. Well, good luck."

"Where are we going to go?" Rogue asked, clearly annoyed.

"Maybe there's something in Port Allen," the woman said. I already knew there wasn't. "But we can't have tents," she repeated.

"Well," I said. "All right. I'll be a while before we can get packed up again." The woman got back in her car and drove off. Rogue and I looked at each other for a long moment.

"I just got all this shit unpacked," she groused.

"There's dinner," I said, with a big fake grin.

We ate and then started rolling things up again. Our neighbor came out and asked what was going on, and we filled him in.

"That's ridiculous," he said. "And they waited until you were all set up and everything."

I started searching for a hotel, but the first two rooms I tried to book were snagged out from under me while I was entering my credit card information.

"The hotels are full because of the floods," our neighbor explained. "Eighteen thousand people were evacuated from their homes."

"Holy crap," I said, glad our situation was only annoying and not disastrous.

"Try Lafayette," he said. "There should be some rooms open there."

"Are you okay with that?" I asked Rogue. "It's another sixty miles."

"As long as I don't have to set up camp again, I can drive all night," she said. I grabbed a room at the Ambassador Inn, bid our neighbor good night, and told the GPS to take us away. On the way to the exit, I deliberately drove over every piece of grass and open campsite I could possibly put in my path, Rogue following with enthusiasm.

At least the night was warm. In an hour we were dropping kickstands in Lafayette, and I was listening to the host at the Inn chatter animatedly about roads, floods, and bikes. Our room was well-appointed, clean and pretty, and they assured us there would be breakfast in the morning.

"We're living large," Rogue said with surprise. "I can't believe this was only fifty bucks." With fewer than 150 miles between us and our destination in Beaumont, we put our feet up and slept in.