Happy Easter

Day 23, April 24, 2011 Happy Easter!

Rest Day – just exploring on Rocket

No miles on a bicycle about - 15 on the scooter

Best Moment  - The bucolic view from our picture window of the horses, the pasture and the stable makes a relaxing, pastoral scene.

Worst Moment – Naturally, I really missed spending today with Chris and Casey and friends – both Neita and I did.  This is the first Easter that we’ve not spent with them. They had invitations to spend the holiday with friends.  Thank you all for your offers to take them in!

So a recap:  So far, I’ve bicycled 1831 miles averaging about 13.5 mph and ridden 21 of the 23 days.  Five of those days were over 100 mile days.  I’ve cycled across parts of 4 different states.  And I’ve used 4 different route maps though three of them were for Texas.  I am amazed at how much I’ve seen from the Arizona desert to the Louisiana Bayou.  Now we’re headed to Florida!  One memorable TV moment was watching Carrie Underwood’s performance of “How Great Thou Art” on a Women of Country special.  I still get chills thinking about it.

Today we headed out on Rocket to explore Baton Rouge, I had copied parts of a bicycle trail map off the internet and thought that I knew were I was going.  Well, streets here run at weird angles – they certainly didn’t have the same ideas as the city planners of Phoenix as far as sensible urban planning.  Anyway, at one point I pulled over, yes Neita has trusted me to do the driving, to try to study the map I had and a couple knowing that I was obviously lost asked if we needed any help.  I told them I wanted to go downtown and they told us to follow them to the street that would take us to the Capitol District.  We followed them.  We got there. Nice!

The area around the capitol was empty, as was the levee area.  We stopped at a riverfront restaurant for lunch, Bloody Mary’s and Po-Boys and watched the river barges heading upstream. One of the barge pushers had 8 barges in front of it!  (Seems like a lot of stuff.) The Mississippi is gigantic!  Neita took several photos of the bridge she had to cross coming into town.  I didn’t have my camera – that’s why no photos today.  On our way home we went through the LSU campus.  It is beautiful and seems huge!