Between Kosovo and Alaska - part four (Virginia)

I know I mentioned the movie Elizabethtown before, but I kept thinking about it. Tracy and I had seen the movie when we were living in Budapest in 2005-06, and the road trip montage at the end of the film was just so... North American (Canadians do them, too), it was something I had been thinking of since we knew Alaska was a possibility. I had the option of shipping the car to Anchorage, but it would have cost thousands, and it didn't really take much to persuade me to drive.

It's not that I like driving, because most often I don't. But I had been mostly living outside the US since I left Lehigh in 2010, and I had some feeling that I needed to see everything again, reconnect, and I knew I had friends and family most of the way from Atlanta to British Columbia. I now needed that - needed them - more than ever. My dad had installed a new radio in our old car, new tires, and I had arranged a detailed itinerary to Virginia, the DC area, and then stopping in Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and then into Alaska. It would take 6000 miles (10,000 km) and three weeks. First stop was Blacksburg, Virginia.

I drove on back roads from Muscadine, Alabama into Georgia, then through Rome until I reached the interstate south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I knew the back roads of Georgia and Alabama well, Georgia largely from driving to bike rides, Alabama from the long drives between Montgomery (where Tracy I were based at Maxwell AFB) and my parents' house in Muscadine, west of Atlanta. Those roads often included plenty of struggling communities, the occasional Waffle House or Dollar General, gun shops and churches. When driving past the small Georgia Highlands College near Rome, what looked like a 2-year diploma mill of sorts, I wondered if I should stop and drop off a resume at their HR office. I drove through Tennessee (even saw a QAnon billboard), into Virginia, and reached Blacksburg early enough that I could go out for double margaritas (doctor's orders).

Tracy and I had first seen Blacksburg in 1999, visiting Erich's parents who had moved to nearby Christiansburg after leaving Wisconsin. I didn't go back until I started working with Robert and Jenny, two Virginia Tech professors I had met through an odd combination of circumstances. Robert had attended one of our scenario workshops in DC in early 2013, one focused on Hawaii, and as a tsunami expert he was hooked and kept wanting to work with us. I hadn't seen them since 2015, and when their son Linus was maybe a year old.

Kids, make sure your glasses fit in your helmet (from Tour des Stations, 2018)

So let me start with Linus, because this has to do with bikes. I know parents can call their 5-year old kids smart, be proud of them, but this kid wasn't just smart, he was smart about bikes. He saw my road bike, and started asking questions about rolling resistance, gear ratios, power output for pedaling, stuff that I sort of knew in 9th grade when I started cycling. Sort of. I'm still learning. I couldn't fool him, but in another sense he was still 5, and was most impressed with me not by my bike, or my racing skills (the UCI license did give him pause- I hope he didn't think I was doping), or my bike kit (I have a memory of a very young Linus four years ago, looking at me in disapproval as I left on a bike ride-- he didn't think bright colors were for me, apparently).... No, what impressed him the most was my ability to take off my glasses and stick them in my helmet, all while cycling. This was revolutionary.

My biggest fan

The first morning, Robert knew I would need to go out on the bike. He said we needed to be on campus by around 10:30am, so keep the ride short, he said. Yeah, uh-huh.

The sun rose over the mountains at 6:15. I started my Wahoo GPS at 6:14, and I knew where I was headed.

The film Dirty Dancing was filmed outside Blacksburg, on a hilltop resort off US460. The Mountain Lake Lodge is 18 miles (29km) from the Virginia Tech campus, but the busy highway is a deterrent to taking the straight road. I had ridden there via the quieter country roads in 2015, and since I was preparing for Kosovo, I had mapped out a climb along the way. I didn't really pay attention to the math at the time, meaning I knew how high the climb was but not the short distance it took to reach the summit. In other words, it is damn steep. When I reached the top in 2015, I stopped at the hikers' shop (this is along the Appalachian Trail) and joked to the cashier about how unexpectedly difficult the climb had just been. He looked at me strangely, "Dude, you just climbed the Mountain of Misery."

I knew that climb. Every serious cyclist in that part of the country had heard of the Mountain of Misery ride, and I had just finished the final climb without realizing it. What a noob.

 

So this time I knew what to expect. The roads took me past campus and into the countryside, quiet winding roads down to the New River, fog and mist still covering the water. I was still recovering from a sinus cold I had caught on the flight from Istanbul, so admittedly my memories of that landscape are tempered by coughing and hacking. To me at the time, that all seemed symbolic. I needed to get into the warm air, I needed to exert myself as much as possible, and I just needed to get out all these toxins and poisons.

The road gently climbed from the river to the start of the mountain proper. It was much cooler than when I'd first climbed the mountain four years previous, so I'd hoped that this time I would be faster. I was in the end, by all of 23 seconds out of a time of 48 minutes. That was- not a great improvement. The climb itself is 10km long at an average 6% grade, though the last 4 km average 10%. It's a very quiet, winding climb, since most traffic to the mountaintop use the other road closer to the highway (and which is not nearly as steep). The only real disappointment was that there was no gift shop at the top, no T-shirts saying "Baby put me in a corner," or Patrick Swayze Christmas ornaments. I suppose there was the trail shop, but I reached the top before 9 AM and it wasn't open yet. I needed to keep moving, because I promised Robert that I would be back at the house by 10 AM. Twenty-nine kilometers in one hour, I could do that.

Baby was here

Back in 2015, I had simply retraced my route because I wanted to avoid the main highway. This time I took the main road, descending on extremely well maintained asphalt for 10 km. That part was fun, certainly more than the overly steep and winding misery descent, where in 2015 it'd been so hot I had to stop twice to let my wheel rims cool down from braking. This time I only had to lightly touch the brakes, and on the way down saw a group of students running the climb on the way up. That looked painful. Perhaps a hundred of them, their buses had gone on ahead to take them back down the mountain-- why work so hard when you can't enjoy descending? Anyway, a few of them even cheered me on, but their faces became more and more pained the farther back they were in the group.

Sinking Creek falls

The roads wound past Sinking Creek, and met up with the 460 highway, which led straight back to Blacksburg. I didn't enjoy the highway experience, especially the short segments where I had to climb, but at least the Wahoo map directed me onto parallel roads when it could. I reached the Virginia Tech campus again, back toward the house, and arrived just at the same time as Robert drove up in the car. I was exhausted, but happily so. (I'd ridden over 50 miles in 3.5 hours, with over a mile of climbing.)

We spent the morning on the VT campus, and this turned to disaster planning for Alaska. Robert helped me formulate a plan with the VT faculty and admins to share resources remotely, as a way of getting my Alaska MPP degree off the ground should I find I didn't have the resources in Anchorage. This was not a simple matter, since universities can spend years negotiating shared courses and tuition- we were cobbling an agreement together over two mornings. It gave me a sense that I wasn't alone and completely helpless, and after I'd written up the plan and sent it to the dean at UAA, she shared it with the provost as an example of how creatively (and quickly) I was trying to work through the crisis.

I left after three nights, this time bound for the Washington DC suburb of Greenbelt, Maryland. I was due to spend time there packing up the storage units we'd had since we'd lived in DC and before Europe, but the uncertainty of the situation had forced me to reconsider. Shipping everything would be expensive, and while Alaska had given me some funds for the move, a shipment that far would be horribly expensive, even more so if I had to turn around and ship it back, So the same morning I sent Karen the VT-UAA cooperation agreement, I called to cancel the moving trailer. But, the previous month this move had seemed essential, and so Greenbelt was the only place along these three weeks where I prepaid for a hotel room (and for three nights!), since under what circumstances would I NOT need to do this?

The drive from Blacksburg to DC is one I'd done a number of times before, but this time I chose to
stop along the way in the town of Front Royal, west of DC. I'd never biked through the Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive, and wasn't about to pass it up this time. It meant a very hot noon start from near the 7-Eleven at the park entrance, and after buying my park pass ended up waiting in the sun for a long time waiting for a construction crew to open the road. Skyline Drive is over 100 miles long, running through the Virginia Mountains, and despite my time living in DC I'd not biked it. But rather than do a straight out and back to a certain point (I certainly didn't have time to ride 210 miles), I followed a loop that only went as far as Thornton Pass, then west through Luray and then up a western ridge.

The first climbs go up about 1000m (3000+ feet) from Front Royal, and I was one of the few cyclists on the road that day. It was the middle of the week and excessively hot, with temperatures in the 90s F (30s C) topping out around 104 (40). The climbs weren't that bad and the road was in very good shape, and from my time in Kosovo I was used to mountain climbs. The heat did wear on me, though, and stress with a combination of travel food and lingering issues from my spring trip to Egypt, was not a good mix.

Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

On one long climb I saw a black bear on the road in front of me, which was a first. I stopped right away, of course, and figured he had right-of-way. I waited there for a few minutes, when a park ranger in a truck drove up and scared the bear over a barrier fence with a loud horn. I continued up the first climbs, descended into Luray off the park boundaries, and stopped at the 7-Eleven there. Without going into gory details, this is where my stomach protested violently. It took awhile to leave Luray, and the second 40 miles of the ride were really, really rough.

It was one of those times when even the most die-hard cyclist wants to call a friend and just get picked up in a car. The route back to Front Royal had only one major climb, a 1000ft (300m) steep cliff outside of Luray, then rolling hills through forested farmland, with only one small village along the way (luckily the gas station was open to buy water). I limped back to the car, drove to a pharmacy to get something for my stomach, and then drove around DC to get to the Holiday Inn at Greenbelt. After a shower, I only had the energy to order room service and collapse into bed. Then I would have to figure out what came next. (Strava record of ride)

I had only just started the road trip, with two long days of driving (and neither pointed toward Alaska), and already I was tired, at least mentally. OK, physically, too, though much of that was a deliberate attempt to deal with stress. The night before I left Virginia, I saw news that a timetable had been set out by the University of Alaska system. The massive budget cuts would have to hit immediately, and many faculty and staff would be given notice by late October, with two months before getting laid off by the end of December. So I had until then, very likely. Tracy would likely have to stay in Kosovo, I might still try to work and save some money from August to December, and then what? Not even tenured professors were safe under the budget cuts, so what was I walking (driving) into?