No Colour in Baton Rouge (USA Day 153)

I did a bit of bike maths this morning, and realised that we haven’t left ourselves much breathing room in terms of catching our flight. Getting to Miami should be easy, but we’d like a few days there, to check out the Everglades, sit on a beach, pack our bikes into postage-stamp-sized boxes, wrap our panniers into suitcase shapes and somehow get all that to the airport. With zero rest days, we’ll need to average 63 miles a day. With one rest day, it rises to 66, and so on. This shouldn’t be a challenge with the profile being so very flat, except for one significant thing: there’s less and less daylight.

We thought we were being clever by checking the weather and seeing at what time Olga would fully clear from the sky, leaving a plain, flat 65 miles into Baton Rouge. But after waiting out the rain, cleaning down our sludgy bikes and re-oiling the bits that should be oily, we emerged into the gloomy daylight to discover a bitter headwind. We rode, tucked into the smallest shapes we could make, for hours. Joyless snack breaks came thick and fast. The miles stuck to my phone screen, stubbornly refusing to tick by.

We saw our fair share of plantations today. The grand, southern houses with their verandas and orchards held a shiver-inducing air of unearned wealth, of inequality and greed. You could see exactly which fields would have grown cotton. Imagine the rows of slaves. The worst thing was that nowhere, not on the historical plaques or grand signs, did we see a single glimmer of guilt. These buildings and their surrounding land was, for us, suffused with horror, but half of the buildings had been preserved lovingly and the other half were hotels or garden centres. Speechless, we rode past each one expecting some educational board about slavery and its associated crimes. There was none.

Perhaps it was this that made the day so depressing. Perhaps the constant dusk of an overcast post-storm autumn day. Perhaps it was the upcoming Cajun seafood restaurants that we’d pin to our maps and approach with hunger, only to find them closed, again and again. Some are waiting to reopen when the tourist season begins. Some never made it through the last one.

Baton Rouge throbbed with clods of sport fans in purple shirts, returning home after the town team, LSU Tigers, had won yet another football game. They’re the second-highest rated college football team in the country, which means a lot here. LSU gets 100,000 fans per game. Take off all the zeros and you get the number of fans for your average English university football match.

It was pitch black by the time we arrived at Jenn’s house on the other side of town. The clock had defeated us for the first time in ages. Jenn welcomed us in, showed us to our room and invited us to join her and her friends for dinner and face masks, both of which were delicious.

We’ve got serious miles to cover tomorrow, and even fewer daylight hours with which to achieve them. It’s going to be tough.