Making Wise Travel Decisions

Yesterday we cycled 68 miles starting near Florence, Alabama and ending in Tennessee:

Once again, we had near perfect weather. A bit of a tailwind was an extra benefit. Here I am with Steve on the bridge crossing the Tennessee River:

While in Alabama we visited a commemorative wall built to remember the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes from Alabama and Mississippi to land in what is now Oklahoma:

After crossing into Tennessee, we ended our ride at the Meriweather Lewis monument.

What does Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, have to do with the Natchez trace? Well, he died on the Trace in Tennessee in 1809 in a rather mysterious way. Whether he committed suicide (he suffered from depression) or was murdered has never been resolved..

I’m in the “he was murdered” camp. Lewis at the time was the Governor of the Missouri territories located in St. Louis and was traveling to Washington D.C. to meet with President Madison. He could have taken the safe way and traveled by steamship via New Orleans. The Trace at the time was notorious for crime. Think about it — boatmen arriving in Natchez from the north and then taking the Trace back north loaded with money received for their goods (important historical fact for young blog readers, wire transfers and Venmo did not exist in the early 1800s). Bandits were plentiful on the Trace. And in a twist on the Las Vegas hotel business model of “we’ll give cheap rooms and make it up in gambling winnings”, the business model of some Trace Innkeepers apparently was to rob their patrons; a few even reputedly had no qualms to also murder them. Here is the last remaining Inn on the Trace, called a “Stand”:

Lewis was also reputedly carrying a large amount of money when he was traveling east. In a classic example of what we attorneys call “circumstantial evidence”, the owners of the Stand where he was staying when he died later purchased a large farm.

Like any diligent juror, I also incorporate my own common sense experiences in reaching the conclusion that Lewis did not make a wise travel decision and paid the price. My high school was located at 15th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, but the baseball team practiced at a field by the FDR Drive and 2nd Street — a very long walk (especially when I was low man on the totem pole and had to carry the equipment). When we got back to school after practice, my Queens friend (the other Jonathan on the team) and I could have made the safe decision and taken the 4 or 5 train to the 7 train. But we often decided to take the L train to the G train since those trains were not very crowded and we could get a seat and start our homework. In retrospect, this was not a wise travel decision. In the 1970s the L and G trains went through areas charitably described as “urban blight”. Two kids with Stuyvesant High School backpacks doing chemistry and trigonometry homework on these trains were the equivalent of carrying a “please mug me” sign. We were just luckier than Merriwether Lewis, perhaps because the muggers were totally flummoxed by our appearance.

I have since made a number of less-than-wise travel decisions. Booking a family vacation on Spirit Airlines, and a separate family trip to Vancouver with a five hour layover in Dallas, come to mind. But it is always an extremely wise travel decision to go on a cycling trip with our friends:

I hope that some of you consider joining us on future trips. Anyway, we ended a really nice day of cycling at the Commodore Hotel in Linden, Tennessee.

It is a nice boutique hotel and we all had a fun dinner, that is until I convinced the proprietor to put on the Mets game, just in time to watch their latest collapse. I can at least report that the Cabernet from a local Tennessee winery was pretty good.

The Commodore Hotel mentioned in this song refers to the famous one in Memphis, but I’ll go with it anyway since it one of Serge’s favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-GwdaKrn8

Today is our last day of cycling and we’re then spending a day in Nashville. I will probably wait until the weekend when we’re back home to do a final post. Thanks for following along!