I am writing from the women's bathroom at Chickasaw State Park since it has light, heat, and power outlets to charge my phone. It also has a delightful symphony of dripping sounds from leaky showerheads and many many daddy long-legs, probably the most I've ever seen in one room. I count six in one shower stall alone, and even noticed, when I looked in the mirror, that one had somehow climbed onto my hat. I caught two of them getting frisky in a corner, so I guess that means one of them is in fact a mommy long-legs.

It is a good thing that I am so easily entertained by arachnids (they are arachnids since they have 8 legs, but not spiders since they lack silk-making capability and venom sacs. Thanks, Wikipedia!) because honestly, this ride is pretty darn boring. Assuming you find my blog entertaining (why else would you be reading it?), you should understand that the sum total of everything interesting enough to bother writing about comprises a tiny fraction of what I actually experience. Mostly it's large tracts of nothing, or, more accurately, large tracts of exactly the same: pasture upon pasture, forest upon forest, cornfield upon cornfield. At this point in the journey I admit that the novelty of biking across the country has begun to fade. The days are starting to blur together.

But I will always recall Wednesday, October 20, 2009, as the day I was riding along, zoning out, staring at a field of purplish brown stalks with fluffy white blossoms and suddenly it hit me: cotton! I had never seen a cottonfield before. I was officially in the south.

Have you ever been so excited about seeing something new that you temporarily forget that you are not the first person to discover it? These were my thoughts as I stood in the cotton field, pulling gobs of cotton out of their four-cornered pod: "Wow, it feels just like. . . cotton! Huh. If you formed this into a ball, it would be a great way to remove toenail polish, or eye makeup! Why, I bet if you could get these pesky seeds out, you could spin this into yarn, or weave it into. . . fabric! The fabric of our lives! Now who would we get to sing the jingle? Aaron Neville! Yes, he'd be perfect! If cotton were a sound, it would be Aaron Neville's soft, soothing falsetto."

Like I said, it is good I am easily entertained. It's also a good thing I can access the internet on my phone, as I was suddenly seized with curiosity about the harvesting and processing of cotton. I thought back to whenever it was that we'd learned about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin back in social studies classes, and how the lesson would have been so much more memorable had Mr. Berardino handed us all a cotton blossom and told us to get to work. It's tough, getting those seeds out. I can see now how it would be a big deal to get a machine to do it for you.

I got back on the road, with Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Cotton Fields" in my head. "It was down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana. . . " Wait a minute. My ever-expanding knowledge of U. S. geography told me that Louisiana is much more than a mile from Texarkana, which a quick Google Maps search confirmed. I am now a little disappointed in John Fogerty, and don't know if I can trust him any more. Did his mama really rock him in the fields, in those old cotton fields back home?

The other high points of my day was a slice of peanut butter pie at the Village Eatery in Henderson, TN followed by a trip to the post office. A trip to the post office always feels great while on the road. It give you a link to real life, a sense of structure and order and tending to obligations. There is a simple satisfaction in selecting the right packing materials, boxing things up, writing out address labels, and getting objects from here to some other place where they need to be.

On this day I sent a birthday gift to my business partner (a bottle of bourbon from one of the towns I rode through in Kentucky, which he probably could use), some payments out to some of the state parks I camped at (they tend to use honor system envelopes, and I invariably seem to not have correct change) and, a little scarily, my sneakers. I'm not 100% sure that was a good idea, but I've found I'm doing pretty much everything—biking, hiking, swimming, and going out on the town—in my Merrell water shoes. They dry out fast, and are comfortable even when wet if you throw a pair of wool socks on with them.

Wow, I'm reduced to writing about my footwear. Like I said: boring.