Simmesport, Louisiana

We rode through a historic St. Francisville early in the day. Steve and I snapped photos of many of the old buildings in town. This has been a welcome sight; for a long time we have been pondering the existence of charming little towns on the tour. The TransAmerica Trail—which Steve and I rode two years ago—has many a bastion of Americana tucked away in the sprawl of the mundane.

We took a ferry across the Mississippi, dodging barges and tugboats. The man collecting fare waved us through, which was good because we didn’t have any money except for nickels and a fifty dollar bill.

On the other side, we rode along levees designed to contain the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. The grass was green, which was good for the cows, and the pavement was flat, which was good for my recovering knee. A man in a truck stopped and gave us his contact information, telling us to call him if we had any trouble in Louisiana. As we thanked him for the gesture, we noticed a bicycle in the back of his truck. We were hoping it wasn’t a common thing for bicyclists to need to call the cops in Louisiana: the piece of paper he wrote his number on also indicated he was a sheriff deputy. An nice gesture, though, from one cyclist to another.