I enjoyed a wonderful second Saxapahaw experience last night at the home of Julia Marina & Dakota– and Katja, 11 months old and a fireball of energy!! Aside from being great hosts and conversationalists, sharing their interesting life stories, they also inspired me by making their own kombucha, pasta by hand, laundry and dish soap, finger foods, and much more!
I plan to follow their DIY lead in these areas + more, when I next plant myself somewhere for months or years…

I spent some good time playing with Katja last night and this morning. It about broke my heart earlier today when she was outside, saw me walking away with all my gear, and started loudly whining.
Luckily, tonight’s hosts also have a very lovable furry fella: Banjo, a five-year-old lab mix, very predictably playful!!

To avoid the morning precipitation, I left early this afternoon for 14 wet, gray miles today into Carrboro. I’m now on the western edge of North Carolina’s “Triangle” (Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh), where I’ll soon be entering another holding pattern…

There’s no serve-yourself food bar quite like a grocery co-op serve-yourself food bar. As Steve & Phil invite me into their cozy Carrboro apartment for a night’s rest, we detour to dine together at the local grocery co-op. Interestingly, once again I’m seeing far more grocery co-ops as I proceed north (a great thing!!). For sake of comparison, the entire state of Texas has one grocery co-op. (Yes, in Austin.) Many states still don’t even have one. Luckily, however, the co-op and farmers’ markets trends have been steadily growing over the years, as more people demand better quality food choices…

…
I was unsure how I was going to set out for the 30+ miles this past weekend between Elon and Saxapahaw, as I saw no town conveniently located in the middle. At best, I could hope for somewhere safe to pull off of NC Hwy 54 and sleep somewhere hidden, outdoors over the subfreezing Saturday night. Friday night at dinner, however, Elon hosts Tony & Megan began talking up Saxapahaw. They had a plethora of great things to say about tiny Saxapahaw’s culture and its progressive cultural movement: great people, culture, food, etcetera– a community which revolves around the central, one-stop General Store. Saxapahaw is invisible on the map until you zoom in, and even that it’s not on Hwy 54, it would only add 2 miles to reroute through Saxapahaw for a night.
“Saxapahaw General Store is on Facebook,” Megan pointed out, so I simply decided to write to the Store on Facebook, telling them my story and that I’d be seeking any assistance they could offer in finding me a place to stay Saturday night.
Jeff Barney, owner of the Store, wrote me back within the hour, warmly inviting me into Saxapahaw, assuring me that they could find me somewhere to stay “within the village.”
After 17 happy-yet-arduous miles Saturday, I arrived to the Store an hour after dark, and the entire crew warmly welcomed me in, serving me one of the most delicious, appetizing and filling meals of all my miles on the road. It’s of no surprise to me that the magical hub of the tiny, close-knit, unincorporated “village” was profiled last year in the New York Times, and six months earlier, in the Washington Post.

New York Times Link

Washington Post Link

…

It’s basically like having broken my left leg, when it comes to the Chariot which has been carrying all my stuff for the last 2,000 miles. The spring steel support suspension of the Chariot snapped last night, shortly after I arrived to Saxapahaw. Online, I found no one who sells replacements for these parts–not even the company that manufactures them. This meant that the best I could hope for was to hobble it forward on one wheel. Not a viable strategy for my next few hundred miles of walking. This immediately became a very, very serious hurdle (how was I going to continue forward?!?), and I had no idea how this could turn out. However, in the face of every challenge lies an opportunity…

(Yes, there’s a reason I’m writing this in past tense, and I’ll soon find the time to elaborate… )

…

Why would I ever need anything from a car dealership while on a cross-country walk..?
Well, I haven’t, till today. On my way out of Burlington, NC, the flat tire that I had grown tired of re-inflating mile was about to be history. I had a spare tucked away, and even though digging it out and changing it is a time-consuming process, once I did so, I found that my replacement tire tube was only good for the front tire– too small for any of the main wheels– one of which needed urgent service. There were no sport shops or hardware stores anywhere in close range on today’s 17-mile route. However, just over another mile down the road was a new car dealership, complete with an auto service department. I figured I’d try seeing if they had any cans of flat-tire repair fluid. They didn’t, but told me that they could order some and have it delivered within just a few minutes. So that’s just what they did, refusing to charge me a dime in the process. This saved me potentially hours of potentially walking miles out of my way to try to find something to repair my tire. These Road Angels keeps appearing everywhere– I love it!

After reaching Elon University earlier in the day, Tony, Megan & daughter Claire are hosting me. Tony & Megan teach Astronomy and Computer Science, respectively, at Elon University. They treated me to one of the most deliciously healthy dinners at the local co-op grocery store, as we listed to live music!!
Great people!!!

Today’s soggy miles bring me to Gibsonville, NC

“You know you’re in the hood, right?” the twentysomething lady behind these gentlemen cautioned me, shortly after my pic was snapped here with Jimmie Jam & Hoop.
I acknowledged her with a shoulder shrug and tilt of my head, raising my eyebrows with a “what-other-option-is-there?” look on my face. With many out-of-business retail buildings, convenience stores with armored gates, and a neighborhood whose nicest homes may barely swim near the bottom of middle class rankings, it was obvious that Greensboro’s northeastern corner wasn’t the Beverly Hills of the metropolitan area.
After being cautioned by the well-meaning lady, some butterflies did begin buzzing within my belly, but I didn’t allow that to slow me down. At the same time, I didn’t want to appear to be nervously rushing through the area. A few blocks further, I stopped in front of a roadside church, meditated till I reached a strongly optimistic state of mind, and then returned to the road with a much happier and assured mentality and gait. Within the following five minutes, many curious passersby stopped to kindly inquire about the walk– some even insisting that I accept some cash to help me with food down the road. I was given fresh bottles of water a mile or two later.
Physical scars which I find most scary within any “hood” are: a high amount of empty, decaying homes; residential doors and windows with iron security bars; and a large amount of broken or boarded up windows. Aside from a cluster of vacant shops on my way into the neighborhood, I saw very little of the above.
While it’s true that as I was leaving the neighborhood, I walked a block from many parked police cruisers and TV news trucks covering today’s headline story in the Triad– a home where two dead bodies had been found earlier in the day– ironically, it’s also true that random people within northeast Greensboro were collectively friendlier than in any other Triad neighborhood I’ve walked.
The though belly butterflies may buzz again in a similar scenario, I feel a yearning to spend more time getting to know and appreciate residents of some of America’s “hoods.” The people living within these impoverished areas are no less human than the rest of us– yet sadly, they’re all too often despised, ignored and forgotten.
Hmmm…

THIS is what walking across America is like.

I’ve stayed with hundreds of hosts across thousands of miles of walking across America. Documented here with a tiny, cart-mounted camera is my arrival to fantastic hosts Matt & Julieta in Reidville, South Carolina, after walking over 20 km one brisk autumn day. The Hellers are great– I ended up spending several days with them– including Thanksgiving!!

(2min 27sec)

“Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” Rosa Parks’ was born 100 years ago today.

A few months ago, I allowed intuition to guide me as I walked the streets on my way through downtown Montgomery, Alabama. I stopped to sit on the nearby bench before reading the sign. What a jaw-dropping moment of fascination when I actually turned to read it, as the stories I’d learned as a child came to life before my very eyes…

THE SIGN READS:
At the stop on this Montgomery, Alabama site on December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks boarded the bus which would transport her name into history. Returning home after a long day working as a seamstress for Montgomery Fair department store,
she refused the bus driver’s orders to give up her seat to boarding whites. Her arrest, conviction, and fine launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Boycott began on December 5, the day of Parks’ trial, as a protest by African-Americans for unequal treatment they received on the bus line.
Refusing to ride the buses, they maintained the Boycott until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered integration of public transportation one year later. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Boycott, the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.