June 17, 2023
Day Five: Portageville, Missouri to Paragould, Arkansas
I was awake at 3:40, then spent a few hours doing chores and working on the last two days' worth of updates for this journal.
Once on the road, I made an immediate stop at the Food Rite just up the street from the motel for breakfast - Cheesy eggs, biscuit, fried potatoes - a surprisingly good value for $2.50. For the third time in the last few days, though, my bottled Diet Pepsi was a little flat. What's up with that?! Hopefully it's either an anomaly or a regional bottling difference. If the latter, I need to make quick progress on the bike and get out of this flat-Pepsi area.
I quickly rode through town and took only one photo. I wanted to get some miles done before it got hot, and I was anxious to reach Arkansas, which would be a new bicycle touring state for me.
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The first several miles after leaving Portageville were on a flat, straight, low-traffic state highway. I was making very good time, but then I exited onto mostly-gravel county roads. I was much slower now. The gravel surface was not especially rough, but it was soft. Obviously it had rained recently.
The only people I saw on this section were a man and woman fishing from one of the irrigation ditches. I stopped and talked to them for a few minutes, then continued on. My hopes were briefly raised when the soft gravel ended, and a smooth section of chip seal began. Sadly, it didn't last long, and I was mostly riding on gravel until I reached Holcomb, population 635.
After poking around downtown, where nothing was happening, I stopped at The Junction, a Cenex gas station on the edge of town, and purchased a few snacks. Once again, my bottle of Diet Pepsi was slightly flat. This was a very worrying trend. I drink a lot of Diet Pepsi, and simply cannot afford such a disruption to my orderly life as a change in the Diet Pepsi formula and/or carbonation process.
I sat in a booth in the store and eavesdropped on the two employees - a young man and an older woman. However, I could not make much sense of their obviously well-practiced banter and in-jokes. Not for the first time, I wondered what it would be like to work in a place like this. I would likely be fired in less than a week for my inability to make change correctly.
I got back on the road, which was now smooth pavement all the way to the Arkansas state line.
| Heart | 9 | Comment | 2 | Link |
10 months ago
I was pleasantly surprised by the Arkansas state line sign - it was a good one. I took some time arranging things for the photo of the 43rd state in which I've traveled on a bicycle.
Several miles later, I stopped in the first Arkansas town, Piggott, population 3,849. Piggott appeared to be a tidy, thriving place.
I walked into a Hardee's. Instead of the table of old men I usually encounter in small-town restaurants in the morning, this time it was a table of women. Unprecedented.
I sat and ate my egg-cheese-biscuit and hash browns, and, as an experiment, drank some sort of raspberry-flavored ice tea from the soda fountain. It was surprisingly good.
I listened to the ladies at the table, but could barely understand most of what they were saying. Theirs were the thickest accents I'd heard in years. While I sat there I tried to determine my destination for the day. I'd been checking the Sunday weather forecast for a few days, and thunderstorms were still predicted. I decided it would be prudent to take a day off tomorrow, so I called a Holiday Inn Express in Paragould and reserved a room for two nights. This was a pretty big splurge, but I decided I had to spend some time figuring out where I was going next on this trip, and maybe I could use the day at a nicer hotel to get a little work done. I'd had a few small emailed requests from customers since I'd started this trip, and I needed to address those.
I quickly used Google Maps to work out a route to the hotel, then rode out of Piggott.
I was almost immediately on gravel, some rough, some soft, and some, unfortunately, both soft and rough. There was zero traffic, though, and much of the scenery was nice. There were more trees and shaded sections than this morning, which was good, because it was hotter than yesterday.
It had obviously rained quite a bit here recently. I had to dodge a few puddles, and gingerly ride through a few muddy sections where the gravel surface became dirt. But I succeeded in avoiding getting the bike (and me) too messy.
I arrived in Rector, population 1,816. There were the usual murals celebrating the town's long-ago heyday.
There was also a sign marking the site of the (long-closed) first Kroger store in Arkansas. I wasn't sure why this was worth commemorating, but I've seen odder things on bike tours, of course.
Most of downtown Rector was dead, but there was the "Caffeinated Cow", where I spent several minutes eating chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone, steeling myself for the thirty or so miles to Paragould.
It was now 90F. Hot. The pavement ended soon after I rode out of Rector. It had been very flat all day, but now there were a few hills.
As I came within about ten miles of Paragould, though, the gravel finally turned to pavement for the remainder of the day, an event I thought worth documenting. There are few things sweeter than smooth, smooth pavement after miles of gravel:
Google maps had me on a winding route to my hotel in Paragould (population 29,906). I was stopped on the side of one of the backstreets when a young man pulled up beside me, rolled down his window, and asked "What kind of tires are those?" He was a "bikepacker" who had actually heard of the Teravail tires I use. I gave them my usual enthusiastic endorsement, and (perhaps unwisely) bragged that I'd never had a flat tire when using them.
I rode through the old Paragould downtown, which seemed pretty lively, then through an industrial area, before Google Maps dumped on a busy highway less than a half mile from the Holiday Inn Express. It was an easy ride on the shoulder to my destination.
After checking in and doing the usual chores, I walked across the busy highway to a Dollar General and bought some groceries for tonight and tomorrow, having decided to skip an expensive restaurant meal since I was spending too much money on a couple of nights in a nicer hotel.
Today's ride: 74 miles (119 km)
Total: 356 miles (573 km)
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| Comment on this entry | Comment | 4 |
(Somebody didn't read my "Obligatory Boring Gear Description" section ;)
...Probably because I accurately labeled it "boring".
10 months ago
(Actually, I found it interesting, then forgot.)
10 months ago
10 months ago