Elvis and Tilly.

Posted by on 29, Mar 2022 in 2022 - USA, Tilly the Tandem, USA

Elvis and Tilly.

The coast around Biloxi is full of enormous casinos and sky high prices for hotel rooms so we crossed the bridge into Ocean Springs to escape to the cheap seats for the night.

The town was far nicer than the casino end with some gorgeous beaches and an old centre with restaurants and shops so we had booked 2 nights at the former home of Elvis, now a hotel.

We adjourned to the bar for the evening and had a great time chatting to the locals and were not surprised to hear a Geologist tell us that climate change was all a political conspiracy. Ironically this whole coast line (including New Orleans) will vanish in the next 20 years due to climate change according to the Local papers headline that day.  I wonder if the King Cnuts here or perhaps King Nuts here will believe it then.

For our day off we ventured into the town. We set off from our hotel at the same time as some guests in their car and were happily muching on our Potato Donuts – don’t knock it fab-u-lous – before they arrived. Being America the town is a gridlock of huge cars driving around trying to find a place to park and occasionally having to get out of the way of tandems.

We enjoyed the town immensely. Very relaxing and as it was St Patricks day great fun too. It seems every American is Irish as everyone had green hats (plastic naturally)  and green beer, honest. Green Bud Light.  It is odd though as most Americans tell us they are related to some distant English King as well…. ????

As we’ve struggled to get food here we thought we’d go all in on the American thing and have a burger at Burger King just across the road form the centre of town. Err…. Easier said than done. The main road is a dual carriageway and even though there are plenty of junctions with traffic lights there are no pedestrian crossing facilities so the road never really stops. We watched it for a while and couldn’t figure a way to cross that didn’t involve clean underwear so, made like the Americans and drove it on Tilly…. Ridiculous! Good job we did though as the restaurant was closed and only the drive through open.. So we cycled up to the order point to find poor old Tilly wasn’t heavy enough to trigger their ordering system so had to go around to order at the pay window – very confusing for the staff. We did finally enjoy the Impossible burger though. ????

You may remember Linda has vertigo and American bridges specialise in very low side barriers. If you fell sideways off your bike you’d go over the edge. Not an ideal combination, so throw in a 10 lane highway, what we’ve come to term a Brio bridge (like the old wooden train set bridge that suddenly goes up and over instead of gradually rising and falling) and you’ve got a recipe for Linda’s worst nightmare.

As we approached the causeway another highway joined ours with 2 lanes of constant traffic joining our 3 lanes. Picture the A14 joining the M1. We were safely on the shoulder of the M1 but had to cross the A14 which involved waiting for a suitable gap – which took ages – then peddling like hell to get to the safety of the other shoulder before another series of pickup trucks with no silencers careered around the bend to join our road. It wasn’t fun and once we had crossed began our approach toward the brio bridge.

The gradients are around 7 % on these, but the deafening noise from the traffic was so off putting and the 5 lanes each way just too much for our nerves so we hopped off and walked. Even I felt a bit intimidated, poor Linda was still shaking when we got to the other side and cycled 5km down to Pascogoula Beach for a smoothie in a treetop cafe in the sun. Perfect relaxing end to the day. The road however was horrendous and also a national Cycle route.

After our chill time we headed to our hotel where we had decided we would get a Pizza, but faced the age old how does a chicken cross the road scenario and opted for a veggie burger in the Hotel bar instead. Good job they did food!

One Comment

  1. Very well done to Linda for making it over that bridge, even walking. I can feel her terror, I think I would probably have actually been crawling !

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