Beaufort, South Carolina
One of the neat things about riding fifty to seventy miles each day are the perceptable changes in environment between each leg of the trip. It wouldn't be impossible to see the difference in a car, but it would be diminished. On a bike you're in the shit and have to deal with the changing humidity and temperature from place to place. In a car you're in a little hyperbollic chamber of comfort where you rarely have to experience Road Smells. I think that's the easiest change to notice, the smell. Hay fields in Georgia smell different from the pine forests and the bogs and beach. I'm not especially fond of the smell of the bogs. Methane from anaerobic bacteria breaking down rotting marsh grass, along with the weight of humidity, impresses on you an overwhelming sense of decay. But, when mixed with the smell of the ocean it becomes less unbearable and more familiar. Going up the coast I encounter this more and more, and while it's still comfortable, it doesn't hold the same relaxing effects the longer you stay in it. I need variety to break up the similarity of the coast. I need the sporadic, tight wooded areas to keep things fresh and from getting bored.
Orlando
Go Gators! |
Amid evangelical churches and billboards for the newest million dollar attraction are generations of kids doing things identical to kids in every other city. This shouldn't be seen as a banal acheivement toward some mutual mediocrity. In spite of the restrictions of being in the cultural epicenter for projecting propaganda for the atomic family, there is a group of normal, nonterrible people who have established a place for themselves. From this culture of corporatism and apathetic rebellion come some of my favorite people. I'm probably not a good judge of this, though. I'm just another person who left and and removed any connection to the city.
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