A Southern Girls Guide To Ditching

On the morning of the third day with Michael, he spoke of taking another day off of work and continue heading south with us. We gave each other the covert wide-eyed girl look that screams, "What the hell?! Save me!" It had been fun to have a pause in Kat and Rachel's Series of Unfortunate Events. But as my mom told me-as I sobbed to her over the payphone about my screwed up flights on the way over here, heaving, "This is exactly what I hate about traveling!" (when tired I become inept at damage control of any sort)- that traveling is about discovering what you're capable of in tough situations, as well as seeing new people and places. With someone else manning the helm of the trip, we felt like we were on a cycling equivalent of a cruise ship and not a bad-ass sailboat.

Being Southern ladies, we didn't want to be rude, but we didn't know how to gracefully bail out.

While Kat was off peeing, after several false starts, I finally said, "We'll probably ride with you till Mainz (the end of our bike map), but then I think we're going to peel off and resume our girl bonding trip." He just shrugged and said, "Ok. Sounds perfect." Man, why do us Southern girls over think this kind of stuff? Worrying over nothing.

So we got to Mainz and he went on to Frankfurt while we headed south towards Mannheim.

Which brings me to recount what has to be the one most difficult night of our entire trip.

Kat and I were already really tired but we wanted to get as close to Mannheim as possible, find a nice campsite and get a good night's sleep. We rode along the elevated path through southern German farmland. It looked just like a photo from a Fodor's travel guide that is so vivid you think, "Surely that must be photoshopped." But no, real, all real. It was so nice to be back in the countryside after a stint through so many industrial towns along the Rhine, between Bonn and Frankfurt.
Around 9pm we came upon a confusing rerouting of the path for construction and I saw one of the temporary signs thrown on the ground to the side of the road. Then we passed a parking lot full of teenage boys who began to laugh as we passed. I have really learned to hate groups of teenagers on this trip; If they're not trying to run us off the bike path into stinging nettles, then they're spraying us with a fine mist of soda, or just being little shits in general.

The thought popped in my head that they had changed the signs around as a mean joke on unsuspecting cyclists like us. The route took us down a long straight road to the river with only one muddy road branching off to the left. Two of the teenage boys passed us on their motorbike, honking and hollering, and stopped at the river ahead. The route took us down a long straight road with a muddy bike lane branching off to the left as the only exit strategy in sight. And in the waning light I thought, "Oh no. I've seen this situation played out before on a Lifetime channel's Afterschool Special. Shit."

We continued along with no assault and passed by the only campsite in 50km. There were lots of camper vans and a few tents, but not one person. The gates were locked and despite our 'hallos!', no one appeared. I could possibly, maybe understand the campers being shut down for the high season of late June, but why leave tents up? It was the eeriest thing ever, combined with the teenage boys, that when we soon came upon a cute clearing on the bank of the Rhine, I couldn't fathom stopping.

We hauled ass through the next two towns and stopped as soon as the path took a turn for farmland again. By this time it was far past dark and we made camp by the moonlight near fields of hay. It sounds romantic, and it should have been, as we huddled in our sleeping bags having a small dinner consisting of chocolate. But as a result of our Lifetime freakout, the camp ghost town, and extreme exhaustion, Kat and I were sufficiently petrified not to sleep at all the entire night. I kept imagining having heard heavy breathing by the tent, footsteps in the grass, and voices.

Worst case German Chainsaw Massacre scenarios incessantly flashed through my head and I kept trying to shove them out with images of butterflies and beaches. People say that camping on the side of the road gets easier, and it did-the part of falling asleep on hard dirt and setting up camp super fast in all conditions. The part of two girls with no method of defense-except maybe peeing on ourselves and clawing eyes out-and sleeping with only a thin layer of fabric between us and the world, that part got no less difficult. In fact, I think it got progressively worse as we headed south into more densely populated areas.

As we packed up camp early the next morning I kept thinking, "I'm totally over this. 4 walls=heaven. No more. No more." We made a bee-line to the nearest bakery which was to be found in a bizarre German version of Super Walmart. There were all these small groups of old people having passionate discussions, and running on empty as we were, this was highly comforting. We craved somewhere secure. We sealed the deal with a large cup of coffee and two pastries, each.

Worst day ever, and it was all in our heads.