Bike Odyssey 2014 – end of day 8 – 5/24/14

This is turning into the Waffle House tour of America. Everywhere else is a burger joint, and my feelings are best expressed in poetry:
My heart has been won by The Waffle House
For reasons I don’t understand
But the sight of their sign
Brings peace to my mind
And their eggs are the best in the land
Here is Anna, newly arrived from Jersey and working in what is so far the cleanest and most smartly turned out Waffle House we’ve sampled. (Is there a reward in this? Shall we start grading Waffle Houses?)

Our very nice couchsurfing hosts! We’re in Birmmingham, Alabama, after a good day’s biking under pleasant skies, from Tennessee through Georgia (I’m mumbling, ‘Don’t let the sun go down on you in Macon County, boy’) and into Alabama, including a coffee at The Spot in Fort Payne, a very nice spot indeed, formerly a hardware store, huge, with 100-year-old floors and tin-plate ceiling. We avoided I-59 with its nightmare interstate traffic, and took Route 11, the ‘Old Birmingham Highway,’ which is to I-59 as route 66 is to I-40: running alongside the interstate but ignored, delapidated, quiet, and perfect for biking. Horses watched us go by; time seemed to stop; stores full of rusted junk, and yard sales, drifted past.

Had to ask 8 local employees before a customer in a Starbucks could direct us to the neighborhood where Teresa lives. It was the neighborhood that all the people I asked were actually in. As one friendly Southern girl – very Southern, very friendly – put it succinctly, as amazed as I was that no one knew the neighborhood where they themselves worked: ‘You don’t shit where you eat.” All people know of where they work is where to park; they know literally nothing of what was once meant by the word ‘whereabouts’. Circumambulating America you’re struck, just as you feared, by the endless loop of identical franchises that passes for local shopping outlets. Hard to tell where you are. Are you anywhere? Tonight we have a novelty: a tent on Teresa’s balcony, high in the trees overlooking the highway.