The first tour I undertook with the bike I’m presently riding, Trek’s 520 touring bike, was to Ecuador in March of 2005 to visit Jim and Marshia, cycling compadres from Chicago, who were a year into their latest endeavor running a B&B in Banos. They got into the business when a cycle touring enterprise they set up to lead tours in Ecuador failed to generate enough clients to sustain it. They liked the B&B that had been the base of their operations enough to buy it.
Now here I was fifteen years later closing in on Jim and Marshia once again, this time at their current base in Gulf Shores, Alabama, as they’ve turned over the operation of their B&B to a 50-year old Englishman who they hope will assume ownership after he’s run it a few years and generated enough income to afford their asking price. He’d been living in Banos the past ten years after burning out on being the chief accountant for the Manchester post office in the UK.
Marshia (the only person she has ever come across who spells her name the way she does) came to know him through a non-profit that they both served on as board members and recruited him to take over their B&B. He’s less than six months into the endeavor and showing no signs of faltering, but Jim and Marshia know there is a chance they may have to resume the reins, though they hope not. Their son Jason is still on the scene in Banos running a brew pub, keeping an eye on how it goes.
It wasn’t Ecuador so much that they had grown weary of, but rather the ”hospitality business,” answering the same questions and dealing with the same petty concerns day after day, meeting an array of interesting travelers from all over the world they would gain a short-term attachment to hoping for a continued friendship but knowing that was pretty much beyond the realm of possibility.
Rather than returning to Chicago, where their two other children and their lone grandchild reside, they have temporarily settled in Gulf Shores, Marshia’s home town where her brother and sister still live and her father too, who is in hospice care, living with his son. Marshia has been back since August. Jim recently joined her after she rented a three-bedroom house on the first of the year. I was their first guest, getting to camp in their back yard on a thick bed of pine needles.
Gulf Shores is home to a large population of Snow Birds, wintering northerners, mostly residing in the miles of glitzy high-rise condominiums hugging the coast all the way to Florida. It was an unsettling sight riding past this mix of Las Vegas and Sedona after having avoided all such development riding inland through Florida and Georgia and Alabama. The condos began a ways after I reached the coast in Pensacola and then went on and on all the way to Gulf Shores, “A Small Town with a Big Beach.” The developers had won the battle with all the long-time homeowners who once owned ocean-front property, many wiped out by one hurricane or another.
Marshia admitted she was briefly enticed by the view of the ocean and a daily double of a sunrise and a sunset over the gulf that she would have had from a high-rise condo, but knew she couldn’t possibly endure living in such confinement, so found a house to rent in the old part of town not far from her sister. It was hard to imagine all the thousands of condos were inhabited, so there might have been some enticing bargains, but she couldn’t be tempted. The occupancy rate isn’t a widely discussed topic, so she didn’t know what it might be.
Since Jim had only just recently joined Marshia he had yet to connect with or establish a cycling community as he has wherever he finds himself or come up with an outlet for his other passion—reading his poetry. He pioneered poetry slams in Wicker Park along with co-founding Chicago’s Critical Mass.
Now here I was fifteen years later closing in on Jim and Marshia once again, this time at their current base in Gulf Shores, Alabama, as they’ve turned over the operation of their B&B to a 50-year old Englishman who they hope will assume ownership after he’s run it a few years and generated enough income to afford their asking price. He’d been living in Banos the past ten years after burning out on being the chief accountant for the Manchester post office in the UK.
Marshia (the only person she has ever come across who spells her name the way she does) came to know him through a non-profit that they both served on as board members and recruited him to take over their B&B. He’s less than six months into the endeavor and showing no signs of faltering, but Jim and Marshia know there is a chance they may have to resume the reins, though they hope not. Their son Jason is still on the scene in Banos running a brew pub, keeping an eye on how it goes.
It wasn’t Ecuador so much that they had grown weary of, but rather the ”hospitality business,” answering the same questions and dealing with the same petty concerns day after day, meeting an array of interesting travelers from all over the world they would gain a short-term attachment to hoping for a continued friendship but knowing that was pretty much beyond the realm of possibility.
Rather than returning to Chicago, where their two other children and their lone grandchild reside, they have temporarily settled in Gulf Shores, Marshia’s home town where her brother and sister still live and her father too, who is in hospice care, living with his son. Marshia has been back since August. Jim recently joined her after she rented a three-bedroom house on the first of the year. I was their first guest, getting to camp in their back yard on a thick bed of pine needles.
Gulf Shores is home to a large population of Snow Birds, wintering northerners, mostly residing in the miles of glitzy high-rise condominiums hugging the coast all the way to Florida. It was an unsettling sight riding past this mix of Las Vegas and Sedona after having avoided all such development riding inland through Florida and Georgia and Alabama. The condos began a ways after I reached the coast in Pensacola and then went on and on all the way to Gulf Shores, “A Small Town with a Big Beach.” The developers had won the battle with all the long-time homeowners who once owned ocean-front property, many wiped out by one hurricane or another.
Marshia admitted she was briefly enticed by the view of the ocean and a daily double of a sunrise and a sunset over the gulf that she would have had from a high-rise condo, but knew she couldn’t possibly endure living in such confinement, so found a house to rent in the old part of town not far from her sister. It was hard to imagine all the thousands of condos were inhabited, so there might have been some enticing bargains, but she couldn’t be tempted. The occupancy rate isn’t a widely discussed topic, so she didn’t know what it might be.
Since Jim had only just recently joined Marshia he had yet to connect with or establish a cycling community as he has wherever he finds himself or come up with an outlet for his other passion—reading his poetry. He pioneered poetry slams in Wicker Park along with co-founding Chicago’s Critical Mass.
He’s always ready to belt out one of his many stirring poems, gladly sending me off with a sterling rendition of his poem “Hospitality Rap” riffing on the many demands of those in the hospitality business. “WiFi or die” came early in the poem, as it is one of the most common mantras of those checking in. Of the various words he rhymes with “hospitality” is one of his own creation—“sur-reality.” (See below for the entirety of the poem.)
It was a biting fifty degrees, below Jim’s tolerance level, the morning of my departure, so he didn’t tag along with me the twenty-one miles to the ferry at Fort Morgan, which would allow me to stick to the coast and not have to take a long detour up to Mobile and then back to the coast. It was the fourth ferry of these travels, the first across the mouth of the Amazon and the other two in and out of Suriname.
It was a biting fifty degrees, below Jim’s tolerance level, the morning of my departure, so he didn’t tag along with me the twenty-one miles to the ferry at Fort Morgan, which would allow me to stick to the coast and not have to take a long detour up to Mobile and then back to the coast. It was the fourth ferry of these travels, the first across the mouth of the Amazon and the other two in and out of Suriname.
I arrived 45 minutes before the departure of the every ninety-minute ferry. By departure time there were twenty-eight cars, the ferry’s capacity. There were license plates from sixteen states plus Ontario, but none of Alabama. A bearded chap in a car with Illinois plates told me it was minus eight degrees that morning in Chicago, about the coldest it’d been all winter.
It was a cold thirty-five minute crossing of the bay that extends up to Mobile with a nasty breeze whipping up sheets of spray off the choppy seas. It was all open-deck, so I had to huddle up against the higher siding in the middle of the ferry.
The ferry took me to Dauphin Island. I exited the island on a five-mile long bridge to the mainland, about the same distance as the ferry crossing. It was one of several long and high bridges I would cross in the hundred miles from Gulf Shores to Gulfport in Mississippi where my next Carnegie awaited me.
It was a cold thirty-five minute crossing of the bay that extends up to Mobile with a nasty breeze whipping up sheets of spray off the choppy seas. It was all open-deck, so I had to huddle up against the higher siding in the middle of the ferry.
The ferry took me to Dauphin Island. I exited the island on a five-mile long bridge to the mainland, about the same distance as the ferry crossing. It was one of several long and high bridges I would cross in the hundred miles from Gulf Shores to Gulfport in Mississippi where my next Carnegie awaited me.
Along the way I was drawn into a discount bakery by a sign in the window advertising three sweet buns for a dollar. I was happy to discover they were 590 calories each. While I waited to pay for them a white-haired man asked the sales clerk, “Where all do you go to church,” the all-important question in the South. He wasn’t familiar with her church, so asked, “Is that Baptist?” They proceeded to have a couple minute conversation. When I finally stepped to the register, the woman didn’t ask me the generic “How are you,” but rather a, “Are you doing okay,” with a general concern in her voice, as if someone only buying the cheapest thing in the store might be in a bad way, even though I was in my bicycle outfit, tights and helmet, and was well-tanned.
Later in the day I finally encountered someone who recognized me as a touring cyclist. I was outside a Dollar Store using its slow WiFi, in contrast to the much faster Walmart WiFi, to download some podcasts. He asked if I was headed east or west, then told me his brother had biked coast-to-coast in 1981 and then didn’t ride his bike again for ten years, and wondered if I might be having similar feelings.
As is the Southern manner, he was in no hurry, lingering for a genuine conversation. He told me that he used to be the captain of the ferry I had taken to Dauphin Island, but now free-lanced around the world. One of his favorite places was Venezuela, but that was fifteen years ago when it was much more stable than it is now. “The evils of socialism,” he put it, then added, “I hate to think what will become of our country if Bernie Sanders becomes president. He’s an outright communist.”
When I crossed into Mississippi the first town I encountered was Pascagoula, birthplace of Jimmy Buffett in 1946. The next town of significance was Ocean Springs, home of the artist Walter Anderson (1901-1984) and WAMA, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, featuring his work and his brothers Peter and James. The museum was full of Walter’s somewhat surreal renditions of the outdoors. He was not only considered an artist, but a naturalist and mystic as well. A series of his murals fills the adjoining Community Center.
Another museum devoted to a local artist was five miles away in Biloxi on the other side of Biloxi Bay—the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. The museum complex of several pod-like buildings designed by Frank Gehry was as much of an attraction as the art within, mostly the eccentric pottery of George Ohr (1857-1918), the self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” whose work went largely unnoticed during his lifetime.
On the other side of Biloxi was the Jefferson Davis home and presidential library. By then I was able to trade the hectic shoulderless four-lane coastal highway with lots of honking motorists for a sidewalk that ran along the wide beach for the dozen miles to Gulfport. It was too chilly and windy for anyone to be on the beach except for a few windsurfers in wet suits. The Carnegie in Gulfport was two blocks inland from the coastal highway and stood all alone surrounded by parking lots, as all the nearby buildings had been devastated by Katrina in 2005.
It looked very lonely and out-of-place in this forlorn, antiseptic setting. It had long before Katrina been replaced as the town library and had never been subjected to addition or alteration. It was now an art gallery, but still retained Carnegie Library on its facade and had a photo from its dedication in 1916 even before it was completed in its entry. The dedication drew a large crowd of all ages, many wearing hats and all looking dressed as if going to church.
Now it’s on to New Orleans and it’s four Carnegies and then Amtrak back to Chicago. I’ll be arriving exactly three months after I flew off to Uruguay.
Hospitality Rap
Is this hospitaity?
Yes, sur-reality
we check em up and check em down
we check you out before we check you in
Where you been?
gimme the code before we unload
it's wi-fi or die
and what? no tv?
how can that be?
and where'm I gonna put my car
can't stand to be too far…
from it
Is this hospital-ity
Or sur-reality?
What's your national-ity?
Swedes are sweet
the dutch don't ask for much
aussies a little noisy
the danes are never much of a pain
and all the czechs are good
where can we go
what can we do
look at the map
I'll show it all to you
go up this street, down that one
turn on the next street
4 blocks up, 3 blocks down
you're right in town
walk around
there's plenty of food around
but forget your haute cuisine
and go for the folk scene
llapingachos salchipapas or fritadas
or you do the pickin'
chicken and rice or rice & chicken
or a meat hog on display
and be nice
to the flea-scratchin' cuy snatchin'
street dogs gone astray
Hear what I say?
see the virgin on parade
follow her to the steeples
kneel down with the people
sense the incense
kiss the padre's ring
and try to remember how long it's been
since you heard an angel sing
this is hospality
I sell congeniality
Yes, sur-reality
the volcano crater?
She's a hot potater
she'll blow now or she'll blow later
so don't let it spoil your tourist day
you hear what I say?
she's a magical vortex livin' in geo-time
but in the meantime
for 200 bucks I'll be your guide
help you feel the vibe
how's the weather?
what's the season?
sometime it changes for no reason
yesterday wet, dry today
you hear what I say?
can you come and build me a fire?
and bring a hair dryer?
my lamp's burnt out
And where's that hiking route?
So do me a bathroom favor
Come up and drain my tub
And bring a roll of toilet paper
And don't forget to change my bulb
Is this hospitaity?
Yes, sur-reality
My bathroom's a lake
For what I'm payin
I want a break in the rate
or I ain't stayin'
See what I'm sayin?
I want somebody to wash my clothes
and massage my toes
thermal springs are cloudy
kids are roudy
the virgin in heat
burns my feet
last night the aussies in 2 were a little noisy til 3
and tonight i know the kids in 8
are gonna stay out late
I found a bug under my rug
and can you make the water
a little hotter?
noise on the street's
disturbing my sleep
And in room #3
the hot water's
where the cold oughta be
and by the way
how long can we stay...
past checkout?
Is this reality?
Or is it hospitality?
Is this hospitaity?
Yes, sur-reality
we check em up and check em down
we check you out before we check you in
Where you been?
gimme the code before we unload
it's wi-fi or die
and what? no tv?
how can that be?
and where'm I gonna put my car
can't stand to be too far…
from it
Is this hospital-ity
Or sur-reality?
What's your national-ity?
Swedes are sweet
the dutch don't ask for much
aussies a little noisy
the danes are never much of a pain
and all the czechs are good
where can we go
what can we do
look at the map
I'll show it all to you
go up this street, down that one
turn on the next street
4 blocks up, 3 blocks down
you're right in town
walk around
there's plenty of food around
but forget your haute cuisine
and go for the folk scene
llapingachos salchipapas or fritadas
or you do the pickin'
chicken and rice or rice & chicken
or a meat hog on display
and be nice
to the flea-scratchin' cuy snatchin'
street dogs gone astray
Hear what I say?
see the virgin on parade
follow her to the steeples
kneel down with the people
sense the incense
kiss the padre's ring
and try to remember how long it's been
since you heard an angel sing
this is hospality
I sell congeniality
Yes, sur-reality
the volcano crater?
She's a hot potater
she'll blow now or she'll blow later
so don't let it spoil your tourist day
you hear what I say?
she's a magical vortex livin' in geo-time
but in the meantime
for 200 bucks I'll be your guide
help you feel the vibe
how's the weather?
what's the season?
sometime it changes for no reason
yesterday wet, dry today
you hear what I say?
can you come and build me a fire?
and bring a hair dryer?
my lamp's burnt out
And where's that hiking route?
So do me a bathroom favor
Come up and drain my tub
And bring a roll of toilet paper
And don't forget to change my bulb
Is this hospitaity?
Yes, sur-reality
My bathroom's a lake
For what I'm payin
I want a break in the rate
or I ain't stayin'
See what I'm sayin?
I want somebody to wash my clothes
and massage my toes
thermal springs are cloudy
kids are roudy
the virgin in heat
burns my feet
last night the aussies in 2 were a little noisy til 3
and tonight i know the kids in 8
are gonna stay out late
I found a bug under my rug
and can you make the water
a little hotter?
noise on the street's
disturbing my sleep
And in room #3
the hot water's
where the cold oughta be
and by the way
how long can we stay...
past checkout?
Is this reality?
Or is it hospitality?
1 comment:
Slidell, North Shore, New Orleans?
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