Murrs Across America

I’m convinced he weather channel could learn a lot from the regulars at Waffle House. Save the drama for the hair, broadcasters, get the accurate description from our waitress, who says she can now fish off her front porch just as well as her back porch. Or Mr. Waffle Cook, who says there’s three feet of water standing on his road. Or Frank, who wears a safety belt for heavy lifting and reports that we didn’t get none out there. All the weather report necessary; no creepy music required.

We walked to breakfast in the rain, obviously. Then we gathered up our things as the sun popped out, and I blogged in the Executive Inn lobby where the owner bounced his three month old, and where the air smelled like delicious Indian food. I brought my own curry leaves on the trip, by the way. If a girl has to do without toilet paper 80% of the time, at least she can have her favorite spices handy.

On this day we hit a stride. We booked it. The kids napped and we made mad time, something like 13 miles per hour all the way to the Tom Thumb station in Ponce de Leon. Barbra, the uber friendly attendant, took the kids out back to pick blackberries, which are bigger and sweeter here than in Missouri. We’ve seen a lot of convenience stores on this journey, and Barbra’s has been the cleanest, most friendly, and healthiest (I’m counting the blackberries out back here) store we’ve visited to date.

By sunset we were exploring DeFuniak Springs. We were greeted in town by a man who called himself Bin Laden, and after we declined his offerings of pizza and gin, we took in the glow of the sunset by pedaling around Lake DeFuniak past the Chautauqua and on to the town’s Main Street, just north of the parked Caboose. Brady fell in love with the Caboose, and while he explored it with Jane and Stuart, I met Richard Murray, owner of the Hitching Post Café, who said we were welcome to pitch our tent behind his restaurant. When I returned to tell Stuart and the kids the good news that we weren’t homeless for the evening, he informed me that a childhood friend, Delores, had bought us a room at the Hotel DeFuniak for the evening. I let Richard know we would be by for coffee sometime mid-morning.

The hotel was beautiful. Everything was breakable and smelled like expensive soap. Cate, our gracious hostess, was intuitive and attentive. She was professional, yet sweet, and extremely inspirational (which I’ll get to in the next post).

Bikers, splurge for a stay at the Hotel DeFuniak and eat at the restaurant there. While the town is a beautiful place, the dinnertime choices at DeFuniak Springs are slim. I won’t go into details here, but I have nothing nice to say about our experience at the Golden Bowl, where the television makes persistent loud censor bleeps and flies come free with water.

After we made the mistake of eating out, Stuart visited the downstairs hotel restaurant for a glass of wine. The people there were lovely to him. They bought his wine and encouraged him to come back. He said the menu looked scrumptious.

We slept “like kings” in the Louis Suite beneath nymphs, princesses, and muses, that I can only imagine were as squeaky clean as we were, thanks to the unexpected gift of an old friend.

Thank you so much, Delores.

Day sponsor Dr. Wendy Anderson of Drury University has declined the mother of the year award this year in favor of honoring our common mother: Earth. Wendy, director Campus Sustainability, is is passionate about promoting sustainability initiatives on campus, within the community, and across the globe. Recently Drury was listed as a “green” university by the Princeton Review due in large part to Wendy’s leadership on projects that helped Drury make the list, including the geothermal heating and cooling conversion of Stone Chapel, the O’Reilly Family Event Center’s LEED Gold status, and solar panel installation on Smith Hall.

Thank you to Wendy and the Drury community for all the enduring work you do to benefit the planet. Happy Mother’s Day!

“We’re sitting on our blessed Mother Earth from which we get our strength and determination, love and humility – all the beautiful attributes that we’ve been given. So turn to one another; love one another; respect one another; respect Mother Earth; respect the waters – because that’s life itself!”
-Wolfdyke Phil Lane, Sr. (Yankton Sioux)

This morning we’re enjoying a leisurely breakfast with new friends Terry and Linda in Fair Hope, Alabama. They picked up the stray Murrs at Tamara’s Steamers last night and escorted us to their home where they poured us small barrel glasses of Southern Comfort from their heirloom green glass eagle. We enjoyed conversation and a comfortable evening, and I’m currently taking notes on motherhood from Linda, mother of four, grandmother of seven. She says you can’t be close enough to your children or teach them enough. As a mother you’ve got to do these things and instill honesty and respect. If you clarify these expectation from the very beginning, she says, you teach your children to think about outcomes, which develops self control and trust as the children grow.

Springfield, bike out to Commercial Street for the first-ever C-Street ECOmmunity Festival! The merchants on Commercial Street are some of the friendliest in the country, and they passed a hat for this endeavor back in January. The Festival sounds like a great time.

Miss you, Commercial Street-have a wonderful day and thank you for the support!

We just left Audie and Vicki Street’s home in Pensacola, and we’re having lunch on the beach in Perdido Key, where we’re going to try to pitch in with some beach cleaning efforts. We’re a few miles away from the Alabama line. More updates to follow. So long, Florida!

I woke up feeling like I’d slept in a muggy washing machine tumbling with Vaseline, elbows, knees, heads, and invasive little fingers. The kids smothered me all night. My benevolent husband gave me some time to myself in the tent after the inevitably early Brady wakeup at 5:50 with the time change. He is a wise (and wonderful) man.

We were on the 9:30 tour of the Florida State Caverns. They were beautiful. The kids especially enjoyed seeing the Eastern pipistrelle bats and splashing in the cave puddles, and I enjoyed the delicate cascading rim pool formations and the brief darkness allowed by our tour guide.

We ate lunch in Marianna at the Gazebo Coffee Shop and Deli courtesy of Larry O’Reilly’s friend and colleague, Walter Spence. Larry is a Springfieldian and an experienced cross-country bicyclist who has provided us with tremendous insight. Debbie from the Marianna post office enthusiastically contributed to our cause over lunch too, and she called Deborah at The Jackson County Floridian to set up an interview.

I am so thankful for the generosity of the people we meet; thankful that they understand we’re trying to be part of the solution for very pressing issues in this nation; thankful that they recognize the value of the experience we’re sharing as a family; thankful that they’re demonstrating to my children a great kindness I could never teach them alone.

We enjoyed visiting with Debora, and she wrote a really lovely article. I feel horrible for the negative comments my birthday blog post yielded in its remarks section. I changed the post as a result, and will be more mindful of the perception of my comments.

We rode in the rain from Marianna to Chipley and hunkered down at the Executive Inn. We walked in the rain to the Cancun Mexican Grill restaurant up the street, and the kids helped me make up a marching duck family song. On the walk back to the hotel a family in a car stopped and offered to give us a ride. People are so kind.

Our hotel room clotheslines dripped and we slept in beds, safe from the flooding streets.

The lady at Hardees thought we were nuts. And she told all her customers that too. But she let us fill up our water bottles with ice, and that was nice.

We biked in hills and wind over many dead snakes and dead butterflies. We were so tired that we all stopped for a Sunday afternoon nap under a tree. We have a speaker that plays music from Stuart’s phone and I remember drifting off under a cloud like a wave to the tune “Skylark”. Brady slept in the Burly, Jane and I on the shark towel that I brought at Brady’s behest and on the advice of Douglas Adams, and Stuart just slept on the hydration pack on his back and our stuff sack of pillows. (He’s hard core).

When we made it to Florida Caverns State Park, a kindly ranger warned us against pedaling two miles uphill on a bad road. We would have tried it without his advice: warm showers were at the end of that road! Instead we opted for the more accessible youth camp area with cold showers. We did have the campground to ourselves, so the kids stripped down and played in the hose and I made a yummy stir-fry that we had to march around to eat because we were attacked by swarms of bugs. The showers were cold, the bugs were intolerable, the ants were ruthless, but the bat and firefly show was fantastic. Also, we all slept very, very poorly.