urban bicycle journeys

Both Tootie and I use bicycles to accomplish much of our shopping and daily errands. Until recently we had two cars but her late mother’s 2004 Honda Accord with 197,000 miles was deteriorating, sometimes sitting unused for months at a time. Two weeks ago after I had to pay over three hundred dollars to fix a broken shift lever we decided “it was time” and sold the car to a UNC physics grad student for fifteen hundred dollars. (An Uber driver later passionately advised me that we could have gotten much more!)

We do often need the remaining car, the 2021 Ford Escape Hybrid, to drive the fifteen miles to our new grandson Frankie’s home in Durham NC. Me, if I want to drive somewhere for a few days with my bicycle in the back, I would need to rent a car or just use the bicycle.

I have bicycled around Danville VA several times over the years, admiring its old buildings and taking photographs. Danville is also on Amtrak and I could go north from there by train. I had never cycled in one day the close to seventy hilly miles from Chapel Hill NC to Danville; a bit of a stretch for someone who just celebrated his seventieth birthday. This past Tuesday the weather looked promising. Here in the South in the summer I prefer cycling in drizzly light rain to intense sunny heat. I put the plastic fenders on my Bike Friday and threw caution to the wind; leaving from our condo building before eight in the morning. My rear trunk luggage bag is not waterproof unless you add the orange rain cover.

My first stop would be in fourteen miles for breakfast in Hillsborough NC. I avoided traffic by taking the slightly longer Dairyland Road. There was light rain part of the way but I just kept going. I saw other cyclists.

I live near Weaver Street Market’s original Carrboro location on Weaver Street and shop there nearly every day. Three other Weaver Street Markets have opened in the Raleigh/Durham area including Hillsborough. The crowd there seemed even more hippie-dippie than Carrboro. From the breakfast bar I chose Mexican scrambled eggs (“migas”) plus spicy tofu mushroom scramble and a croissant. Coffee.

This day’s ride would be broken into three unequal sections: fourteen miles Chapel Hill to Hillsborough; thirty-six miles Hillsborough to Yanceyville, and sixteen miles Yanceyville to Danville.

The temperature never went below seventy-five degrees so even though my plaid Club Ride cycling shirt was still wet I didn’t feel chilled. The plan was to cycle on minor roads running essentially parallel to but staying off of the two lane but still very busy NC-62. On most of the ride to Yanceyville this plan did work. Back roads were smooth. I rag a lot about the unchecked political power of the NCDOT but we are indeed the Good Roads State.

One sees fewer tobacco fields in North Carolina than in the past.

Things go well until they do not. Why wasn’t this “bridge-out” indicated on Google Maps?

With a bicycle I often try to go around such barriers. This time, no way.

I was forced to bicycle backwards two miles as it started raining again. Looking at a map on a wet I-Phone was a particular struggle. I had to cycle a very short distance on busy NC-86. Someone in a Hyundai SUV pulled up to me.

“Are you OK?”

I guess I looked pretty forlorn out there in the rain. At a crossroads I found an alternative-but-longer route on a back road.

I honestly felt a little weak as I finally pulled into Yanceyville NC (population 1,900) and its circa 1859 Caswell County Courthouse.

Yanceyville has a mostly empty traditional downtown. Essentially all commercial activity is half a mile away, out on the highway NC-86.

I really needed somewhere to sit down. Even in the South one does not see that many Black owned restaurants. At a former gas station in-town their door was unlocked but the guy said they were closed today because of a big catering job. At least I got to see their menu.

Out on the highway I found Subway in a strip mall, ordering my usual; turkey on 9-grain wheat, fully dressed but light mayonnaise, yellow peppers.

I wearily hunkered down at Subway and booked an Airbnb sixteen miles further on in downtown Danville VA. Thirty or forty minutes later I felt quite refreshed and left Subway to cycle onward on the parallel Old NC Highway 86 which had virtually no traffic.

On the way a few houses clustered around a “town” called Purley NC.

The Danville city limits are at the state line.

Danville’s total population of 43,000 has stayed about the same since the 1960’s, a city built around two now struggling industries, leaf tobacco and textile manufacturing. I indeed could smell tobacco outside these warehouses on the outskirts.

A huge new casino with adjoining high rise hotel has just opened in Danville, built three miles west of downtown on the site of what was once one of the largest textile mills in the world. It had been a long day so I put off cycling to the casino and checked into my downtown Airbnb, a two bedroom apartment above both a Black women’s hair salon and a hamburger bar / restaurant.

At five in the afternoon my upstairs space was filled with women’s loud laughter and social discussions, sounding like they were in the same room as me. The beauty parlor voices continued until the shop closed at about 7:00 PM.

Dinner was downstairs at Me’s Burgers & Brews.

Just outside Danville is Virginia International Raceway, a curvy road racing track used mostly by sports cars. Two guys next to me at the bar were pros, part of the Lexus team for a race the following weekend.

A Danville significant is that it is on the daily single Amtrak train running New Orleans / Atlanta / Charlotte / Greensboro / Washington DC / New York. I had a ticket for me and the Bike Friday leaving at 8:30 AM to go up Washington. Amtrak is lovable but always seems to disappoint. Checking that morning my train was already more than four hours late. I used the time to bicycle around Danville in on-and-off drizzly rain. This was the view from my apartment.

I cycled around the mostly repurposed warehouses of the Danville River District.

I cycled up the hill on Main Street towards an area they call Old West End. These houses are very affordable.

I would have cycled over to the new casino but it started to rain harder and I had to duck into a coffeehouse. Later on, a few blocks from the train station I had lunch at one of Danville’s better restaurants, the Golden Leaf Bistro. Chicken salad on croissant, side of fried Brussels sprouts.

I boarded Amtrak about 1:00 PM. The scheduled five hour twenty minute ride took a little longer, seemingly forever.

For the next day and a half I had a nice bike ride around Washington DC at the same time Trump was first ordering troops into the streets. I did not see anything all that dramatic but I suppose that is another story.