urban bicycle journeys

Two years ago in February of 2022 my friend Lyman and I departed on what was supposed to be a multi-day bicycle tour from New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast. In the afternoon of our first day Lyman had an “accident” near Slidell LA. He was lucky he wasn’t killed. We had to finish the ride two years later.

This was not my first bicycle tour with Lyman Labry. I met him in the early 1980’s when my now wife Tootie and I were living in his hometown of New Orleans. By 1990 Tootie and I were living in North Carolina and him in Austin TX but we stayed in touch.

The ill-fated 2022 ride started on a Sunday morning. Lyman and I set out bicycling eastward from central New Orleans, him on a folding Bike Friday and me on my conventional bicycle with the brand Surly Long Haul Trucker. New Orleans, like many port cities, has an older street greet that encourages bicycling, but it is difficult to bicycle into the city from outside because traffic gets funneled into choke points, especially bridges. The map below shows our route on this first day out. White Kitchen is a tiny town near Slidell LA.

I cycled from my condo in the Lower Garden District and met Lyman at his brother’s condo in the French Quarter. From there we cycled downriver through Faubourg Marigny and Bywater, then over the Industrial Canal bridge to Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth Ward. We crossed into St. Bernard Parish and the suburb of Chalmette.

After Chalmette, we insanely bicycled across the Paris Road Green Bridge, a bridge that has no shoulder or bike lane, albeit on a lightly trafficked Sunday morning. (photo from Wikipedia). I am never going to do that again. It was terrifying.

We sometimes follow maps published by Adventure Cycling Association. I fault their Southern Tier map for sending us over this bridge. It is true that there is hardly any safe way to bicycle from downtown into the suburban area called New Orleans East. I know now the Leon C. Simon bridge near Lakefront Airport is the better of several bad options..

Beyond the bridge cycling was pleasant on Old Gentilly Road, then Chef Menteur Highway, an older four lane with little traffic and a wide shoulder. It was the original highway into New Orleans from the east before I-10 was built.

In September 1964 the Beatles played New Orleans at the height of Beatlemania. Some worrywart decided because of screaming crowds the Beatles were not safe at a normal hotel and arranged for them and their entourage to stay fifteen miles from downtown out on swampy Chef Menteur Highway in a motel called the Congress Inn. Beatles were quoted as being disappointed they could not see the city. Their only other New Orleans wish, which was granted backstage, was to meet Fats Domino. Now in 2022 we cycled by the abandoned ruins of that motel. The scene was quiet; no people around, still surrounded by marshes.

The swamps beyond the developed parts of New Orleans East have a certain function for our metro area, If you want to get rid of something, here is somewhere to take it. I am sure organized crime has dropped bodies out here, and we cycled by numerous makeshift dumps.

There is inexplicably a NASA facility. Lyman took a selfie.

Because the closest beach to New Orleans is more than an hour away, families have long had second home “camps” along the surrounding bayous, a beach house without the beach. Before air conditioning they served as a getaway to catch a breeze and go fishing. Lyman has long talked to me about his grandfather, born in 1895 to a French speaking downtown New Orleans Creole family. We cycled by camps that looked like the one where In the 1950’s and 60’s Lyman and his grandfather used to hang out.

New Orleans city limits end at a waterway called the Rigolets. We stopped for a picnic lunch on a guard rail; peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Dave’s whole wheat bread.

From that Rigolets bridge it was still thirty miles to our intended day’s destination, the beach town of Waveland MS. Both of us would have felt defeated to stay in a motel in the uncool but otherwise completely acceptable suburb of Slidell LA. There is almost nothing between Slidell and Waveland except swamps. On this day in 2022 Lyman was seventy years old and I was sixty-six. Were we pushing ourselves too hard? Beyond the RIgolets US-90 as a bicycling route was much less hospitable. It now was a narrow concrete highway filled with both large cracks and more car traffic. In hindsight we should have admitted to ourselves “let’s just sleep in Slidell” but we soldiered on.

About ten miles beyond the Rigolets I was about a quarter mile ahead of Lyman. A car slowed and asked out the window if I was connected to a guy just behind us, They said he had fallen. I hurried back.

Lyman was sitting on the side of the road, clearly disoriented. He could not remember what had happened. Cars stopped to check on the situation. Did we need an ambulance, they asked. I stupidly underestimate the seriousness of situations and I said no. Ten minutes later he was still disoriented and I changed my mind and said yes. An ambulance showed up maybe twenty minutes after that. I convinced the ambulance guy to put our bicycles in an accompanying vehicle for the short ride to the Slidell hospital.

Before leaving I took pictures of the evidence. This stretch of US-90 is a dangerous highway. Most bicycle accidents I have seen of people our age result not from being hit by cars but from running into various obstructions in or on the road.

One of the motorists who had stopped to help us at that spot took a little longer to leave because she wanted to take photos of the carcass of a mostly decomposed six foot long alligator.

Lyman had had heart arrhythmia treatments and thought he had fixed it. The Slidell LA hospital diagnosed both heart arrhythmia and a broken arm. They put his arm in a sling and released him after he promised to very soon visit both his cardiologist and an orthopedist in Austin TX where he lives. We called an Uber to take us and our bicycles back to New Orleans.

What happened out there on US-90? Lyman does remember looking around at scenery just before falling. He either had a heart problem that caused the whole accident, or he was looking at the scenery too much on an already dangerous highway and his wheel sank into that crack. The fall must have reignited his previous heart problem. We will never know. We do know now we never should have been on that highway.

Lyman recovered fully within a couple of months but we never finished our ride to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Two years later in February of 2024 we decided to try again. We hoped to ride in three to four days from Mississippi into Alabama and maybe as far as the Florida border.

That stretch of US-90 in far eastern Louisiana between the Slidell area and Waveband MS had a hex on it. We would start this new ride in Waveland MS, our original day’s destination from two years earlier. Waveband and the Silver Slip Casino are the westernmost points of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, about ten miles from the Louisiana line. This is the bike ride we took in 2024.

We had planned to take an Uber the sixty-something mile drive from New Orleans to Waveland but Aubrey, a friend of Tootie’s and mine. offered to do it for the same price. She dropped Lyman and me and our bicycles at a beachfront campground.

Lyman and I started cycling eastward., this time both on folding Bike Fridays. They do seem to operate as well or better than conventional bicycles. The fifty mile long Mississippi beachfront highway US-90 has a bike path or bike lane SOME of the time.

The lovely beach facing this highway opens onto murky Gulf protected waters. Offshore islands keep waves almost nonexistent in normal weather. We always joked when coming to this beach in the summer you can wade half a mile out and the flat bathwater still only comes up to your thighs, This innocent looking sea has risen mightily in hurricanes several times in the past fifty years, especially Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Camille in 1969. The storm surge destroyed nearly everything near the beach and sometimes as far as a mile inland. Huge swaths of previously developed beachfront property now remain empty. Most new construction is on stilts.

A beachfront restroom marked the height of the water during those hurricanes. The top sign is the level of the water during Katrina in 2005, the blue sign for Camille in 1969.

We had lunch at a coffee house in Pass Christian, where the west side of town was still largely vacant from previous hurricane damage. A beachfront Waffle House seemed somewhat prepared for the next storm.

Yes, the Mississippi Gulf Coast does Mardi Gras. There were the occasional plastic beads in the street, a reminder of parades here a week earlier..

The east side of Pass Christian MS has slightly higher ground, and large vacation homes facing the Gulf beach have survived more than a hundred years, many owned by the New Orleans elite.

How far should we bicycle this evening? I am always trying to press on, for no other reason than pressing on helps my psyche. Lyman has a more balanced view. The trip two years earlier had ended badly. We stopped to discuss it at the Chandeleur Island Brewing Company in downtown Gulfport MS.

Sure, I guess we could stay in downtown Gulfport! Hotels have gotten expensive in America. They might stay that way because hotels seem perpetually full even at these prices. Lyman and I may be part of the problem. We now prefer separate rooms which usually doubles the price. While drinking beer I looked at the website Booking.com and found a complete two bedroom house just a few blocks from this brewery for about two hundred dollars total. We never saw an actual person, someone texted us a code to get in. The 1920’s era Arts and Crafts style house had been almost perfectly renovated. It reminded me of the house my mother grew up in, in Lubbock TX, except this one had more modern plumbing,

Restaurants in America have also gotten expensive! In downtown Gulfport MS on a Wednesday night there was a not particularly fancy looking steakhouse with thirty-eight and forty-one dollar entrees but still a line of not particularly wealthy looking people waiting for a table. We opted instead for Tony’s, a lower key Italian-American spot around the corner, We sat at the bar talking with a young single mother who was drinking wine while waiting for takeout. A friend was home watching her child. The woman said she had a regular job but also a side gig cleaning offices, and we talked about being a small businessperson.

It was a week after Mardi Gras but Tony’s still had their Mardi Gras wreath. Mardi Gras wreaths and Mardi Gras trees seem more a Mobile AL custom than New Orleans.

The next morning we cycled over to the cheery and locally owned Boozer’s Brew & Cafe Too, which serves its offerings on actual plates. I ordered a croissant with peanut butter. It was fine, but the bread was not particularly fresh, and the peanut butter was the less healthy homogenized type.

Huge swaths of prime land near the beachfront adjacent to downtown Gulfport remain undeveloped, even though it had been seventeen years since Katrina.

We continued our cycle eastward, now towards Biloxi MS, first on Railroad Street, then on a nice beachfront cycle path.

Biloxi along the beachfront is a strange mix. There were a few historic structures like the restored home of Jefferson Davis (with a “Jefferson Davis Presidential Library”). From TV news in 2005 I knew that the house had almost been completely destroyed by Katrina.

There were large sections of beachfront land that looked previously developed but now were empty.

There were huge new concrete casino hotels.

In the mix, across from casinos, a mid-century Catholic Church.

The bridge over Biloxi Bay from Biloxi MS to Ocean Springs MS has a cheery bike and pedestrian lane.

Ocean Springs MS is a delight. Our first mission here was to locate the childhood home of Gordon Sumerel, now of Chapel Hill NC. Gordon has been my friend, tennis opponent, and bicycle guru for the past thirty-five years. He lived in Ocean Springs MS for two years 1959-61 when he was eight to ten years old, while his father worked at the Pascagoula shipyard. He says those two years were the most carefree of his childhood. We FaceTimed Gordon on my phone while we walked on the street in front of his waterfront former home. He said his Dad had gotten a great deal at renting it for eighty dollars a month.

On that same street was a large collection of fishing boats, some with Vietnamese names.

We cycled the mile or two to the rustic looking downtown Ocean Springs.

Lunch!. A good restaurant is one that is full of people eating. The indoor-outdoor scene at Lady May at 1:00 PM on a Friday was enticing. I spotted seats at the outdoor bar and ordered beers while Lyman looked at the sandwich menu.

We sat catty cornered from two friendly and chatty women; one likely in her forties or fifties and her mother, who appeared to be in her eighties or nineties but quite spry. They said yes, they lived around here. In my travels I have repeatedly run into people doing the all-American thing of leaving one’s life behind, usually in the north, and blindly moving to establish another life, usually in the south.

The younger woman told us their story. All their immediate family had lived in the college town and state capital of Lincoln, Nebraska. Three years ago the younger woman’s brother and his wife and their two elementary-school aged children decided to move south because they were tired of the snow. They chose Ocean Springs MS despite having apparently no prior connection. Their parents were getting on in years and the father was particularly frail, so the parents moved south as well. His sister, the woman at the bar telling us all this, has a progressively worsening sight disability and she came along for the ride. I think she said they all lived together.

Because they needed such a large house they could not afford one in actual Ocean Springs and bought instead fifteen miles from Ocean Springs near Gautier MS. Things have not gone well. They said the frequent drive from Gautier to Ocean Springs is longer and more complicated than expected.. Their elderly father died about a year after arriving in Gautier and Ocean Springs, his daughter says from a broken heart. He just did not like it here. Two years later the rest of the family felt the same way and they are all talking about moving back to Lincoln NE. The woman said they did not get along with their Gautier neighbors who were different from the people in Ocean Springs. Later that day we cycled through their town of Gautier MS and it did seem different;. There were Dollar General stores, mini-marts and gun stores. A lot of people were riding big motorcycles. She said because of her eye condition the excellent city bus system back in Lincoln NE is vital for her. One of the children has some type of learning disability and they thought the school situation would be better in Nebraska. At the Lady May bar in Ocean Springs on this Friday afternoon the mother and daughter lingered over their wine glasses. They left about the time our sandwich arrived. We split a barbecue beef on sub roll.

It had been a great lunch but we had barely cycled twenty miles that day. We climbed back on the bicycles and soldiered on the nineteen miles further towards the day’s destination, the expectedly more downscale town of Pascagoula MS, home of one of the largest shipyards in America.

The first portion of the ride was on country roads through the marshes.

We had expected the subsequent two lane highway would be scary and dangerous but it really was not bad at all. There was a shoulder much of the way. Mississippi rumble strips are problematic unless they accompany a wide shoulder.

Arriving into the exurban sprawl of Gautier MS, just across a river and swamp from Pascagoula MS, we could not find a coffee house so we bought drinks at a gas station. There was a convenient table out front. Louisiana’s Community Coffee dispensed by machine now is available in many such stations, but my flavored cappuccino was so sickeningly sweet that I dumped most of it out and mixed it with regular coffee. Lyman got a plastic pint of chocolate milk.

We plotted strategy on my phone, looking for somewhere to stay in Pascagoula MS (population 22,000.) There were motels out by the Interstate but only one establishment in the downtown, a bed and breakfast offered on Airbnb. It had cutesy names for the rooms and high prices. Airbnb’s app tries to make it difficult to haggle but there are workarounds. I messaged the owner on the Airbnb app asking for a better deal and she responded saying she would make it worth our while. We trusted her enough to ride the six miles over the bridge. We were the only guests that night, paying less than half the price listed on Airbnb.

Pascagoula’s faded working class downtown has a few restaurants, including Scranton’s, owned for more than forty years by the same family who ran our B&B. Ranks are diminishing in America of family owned restaurants downtown with reasonable prices for local cuisine, especially one that is open at night and serves alcohol. . Lyman and I both had delicious shrimp and grits at the bar, talking to a guy about our age who was doing what I am discovering in my travels to be a frequent American strategy, drink multiple cocktails and then leave with takeout. In another room they had just finished Trivia Night.

The next morning we sat around waiting for a light rain to stop. We each made instant oatmeal in the kitchen before setting off about ten or eleven. We would be fighting this weather all day. We cycled through rural areas near Pascagoula MS before crossing the Alabama line.

Our destination that day was Dauphin Island AL, a beach resort about forty five miles to the east and south. From there we planned the following day to take the Fort Morgan ferry which would lead us to Gulf Shores AL and Pensacola FL.

Cycling eastward we were able to stay off of US-90 only some of the time but there was not much traffic.

We then turned south to cycle on an Alabama state highway that threaded through their bayou country. There is lots of discussion among bicyclists about rumble strips. The bumps in North Carolina are small enough not to upset a bicycle but in Alabama on some narrow roads the rumbles felt like boulders, forcing a bicyclist to stay out in the travel lane.

That state highway led us into the town of Bayou La Batre AL (population 2,200.) Signs of shrimping and shrimp boats are everywhere.

Dauphin Island was still nineteen miles further on. We knew the island had only had a couple of mini-marts, no real grocery store, and no restaurants within walking distance of our planned Airbnb house. The house would have a kitchen but no food. Shopping at the last grocery store in Bayou La Batre I got a pound of spaghetti, a can of tomatoes, a 59 cent box of salt, parmesan cheese, a bulb of garlic, a pound of smoked sausage, and a can of string beans. Just up the street we bought a pint of Canadian Club whiskey. We did not have to haul olive oil because we had taken (stolen?) five small butter packets from the B&B kitchen that morning in Pascagoula MS. The butter provided just enough fat to make our pasta sauce, something to sautée the garlic in.

Most of those miles into Dauphin Island were on a completely empty two lane road through the swamps; then a causeway onto the island.

The Airbnb three bedroom sound-facing waterfront house had a fetching view. The apparently concrete slab house certainly must flood with every storm. It is comforting that this is not my problem. It rained all afternoon and night and into the morning.

We broke out the whiskey and enjoyed the view and celebrated our nearly fifty mile ride. I checked status on the Fort Morgan Ferry’s Facebook page. It was not good news. It felt very Third World. What would we do now?

I cooked a delicious dinner that night, spaghetti with tomato sauce, sides of green beans and smoked sausage. We woke up the next morning not knowing what our next move would be. We had only one more day before we needed to return to New Orleans. We were on an island with only one bridge. Without the ferry we would not be able to continue eastward. We would have to bicycle back in the direction we came and then turn towards Mobile AL, forty-five miles to the north.

That morning a cold front was blowing in. Temperatures were in the low fifties and dropping with a steady rain and a twenty MPH headwind. While the rain was predicted to lessen the headwind was not. Did we really want to bicycle back across that causeway in those conditions? Hmmm. Maybe we could buy our way out of this situation. One way rental cars were available at the Mobile airport. We had folding Bike Fridays they would fit in almost any vehicle. Let’s get an Uber! We entered our info into the Uber app but it soon became apparent that we were out of Uber range.

Maybe we could get a taxi! Uber and Lift have put a big dent in the taxi business. I had heard that online manipulators have infiltrated Googling the word “taxi. ” I looked instead at the website of the Mobile airport which listed three taxi companies. The first one’s phone sounded like a bot, so I called the second number at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning. A male voice answered

“Hello?”

“Is this a taxi company?”

“Un, yeah”

It was just a guy and a cell phone with an unusual accent, but what choice did we have? He said he could drive us to the Mobile airport for sixty dollars as long as he finished the whole thing by noon. I texted him our information and he said he would be there in an hour. Meanwhile, I used the remaining ingredients in the kitchen to make a self invented breakfast pasta with sausage and parmesan. Americans like me can be puritanical, always worrying about too much animal fat. Until situations like this I never do what Italians might do; chop the smoked sausage and fry it until it renders a bunch of fat, then mix in the pasta and some pasta water to create a sauce, then add parmesan cheese. There was no olive oil because I did’t have any. With salt and pepper was it, of course, delicious.

Hell yeah! An old White guy showed up in an at least ten year old Cadillac Escalade SUV without any taxi markings, an aged beast that had seen better days but was so huge that we could fit the bicycles in the back without folding.

The almost hour long ride was colorful. Lyman sat in the front, old guys chatting about life. The driver was originally from southwest France near Bayonne and the Spanish border. He had lived in New York City, then New Orleans for twenty years before he met a woman from Mobile AL.

We were almost at our destination when he stopped for gas. I then noticed he had been driving on empty. His debit card was rejected. He went inside and gave them a twenty dollar bill which only covered about a quarter of the tank,

He dropped us off in the rental car area of Mobile airport. I gave him a hundred dollar bill in exchange for a twenty.

We pushed the bicycles inside the airport to get out of the rain.

Neither of us needed to get back to New Orleans until the next day so we decided to park the rental car and bicycle around Mobile AL, a city neither of us felt we had seen enough of. The rain eventually stopped but it was cold and windy. We needed a coffee and a roll. so we cycled a couple of miles on a dangerous busy highway to the Mobile AL chain Yellowhammer Coffee.

I later accompanied Lyman for his first visit to see what Spring Hill College looked like. A Jesuit Catholic institution of about a thousand students, its campus is about six miles from downtown Mobile. Lyman’s grandfather Milton Martin Salaun was Spring Hill class of 1913.

In an older part of Mobile near downtown Lyman and I found an Airbnb rental of a nice two bedroom apartment in the back of this historic house.

Two blocks from that house is the Iron Hand Brewing. We made ourselves at home.

It was a friendly bar scene with delicious pizza and Southern dishes . I was disappointed that on a Saturday night there were not many people there.

The next morning we walked a block and a half to another local spot, a coffee shop called Nova Expresso.

I ordered an oat milk latte with one pack sugar. They had homemade pop tarts.

It was quite the scene at Nova Expresso on a Sunday morning. There were all kinds of people, including four middle aged men with English accents sitting as a group, but not really talking with each other much, mostly each staring at his phone. They must be a work related group, right? But what kind of work? There was a separate food truck outside with breakfast tacos. Lyman and I each ended up getting one.

Sunday mornings are a great time to take a bike ride because car traffic is so light, We took a longer bike ride around central Mobile AL

I have friends and relatives in their sixties and seventies living in places like Austin TX and Norfolk VA who want but cannot find a really small house in a decent older neighborhood. The only places they can find are condos. Mobile AL has historic Small Houses that might fit that bill. While likely built as slum housing, they look to me to no longer house poor people. Is this unfortunate gentrification or a good thing?

Lyman had a flight from New Orleans that afternoon. We put the bicycles in the rental car for the three hour drive. He would drop the car off at the New Orleans airport.