Paducahpalooza
Our first night was spent in Paducah, Kentucky. We were in mortal danger every single second.
Little did I consider when I mapped the first leg of our trip to a tandem adventure in Minnesota and Wisconsin exactly where we would be spending this first night, a mere 63 miles as the heron flies from New Madrid, Missouri.
It was a lovely summer evening along the Ohio unmarred by a cataclysmic shifting of tectonic plates liquefying the solid earth we stood upon, leveling every building in town, and sending a tsunami of Mississippi River water backward up the Ohio River itself, swamping Superman’s hometown across the water and Paducah itself when the New Madrid Fault popped its cork.
If you were not around in 1811 when an earthquake centered on New Madrid famously rang church bells in Boston, nor aware of the burst of absurdity in 1990 when a nutty prediction gripped the region, there’s a piece in the archive to address this gap. Read all about it here.
As it happened on our Great River Road journey as it was being born, nothing befell us while we slept on the banks of the Ohio River in Paducah.
Day One of our journey to reach and then pedal along the Great River Road of the upper Mississippi requires days of driving in a new vehicle, a Subaru, before we’ll take our first pedal stroke. The car is 17 years younger than my previous Chevy and includes a host of electronic features among its standard equipment. This trip puts our new satellite-aided, computer-generated navigation overlords squarely in, as it were, the driver’s seat. It got us through Alabama and Tennessee and guided us smoothly to our river-side hotel behind the flood wall built three feet higher than the flood of 1937.
(It is a testament to the folly of auto culture when, invariably, traffic jams around and in Birmingham, Alabama. I cannot imagine there is a sentient being in favor of spending one second gridlocked in such a place. And yet we cannot solve this chronic condition. Those not busy being born are busy dying.)
In my new Subaru, the branded Starlink system integrates with my phone and Apple maps with Carplay. This combination, with the vital addition of my Apple Watch, combines in a cavalcade of consumer electronics to make digital navigation not only tolerable, but quite necessary.
The Apple maps as displayed on the 6.5-inch screen in the center of the dash console are data-rich. Among its various view options is a dynamic representation of the way ahead on an ever-updating map, along with the mileage remaining and expected drive time before arrival at the day’s destination and highlighting the distance to the next turn, the road to turn on, and the direction to turn.
All of this appears after I set the route in motion by dictating a general end point into the watch – “Holiday Inn, Paducah, river” does the trick, for instance, to set a course from my driveway to the hotel on Fourth Street four states away -- and it offers me three ways to skin the route. After that, each turn is heralded not only on the dash display (a dangerous distraction to use while hurtling down the interstate), not only with the Aussie-accented voice that’s hard to understand, but also with a haptic buzz on my wrist and a simple, unambiguous direction arrow on the watch. The interconnected whole of car, phone, and watch are convenient and useful. The competitive pressure from Waze and other apps seems to have forced Apple to pick up its game. The CarPlay version of Apple maps shows delays and cops and crashes.
The tipping point in favor of this electronic navigation was the uncannily accurate reporting on the speed limit. A little speed limit sign, just like the ones on the interstate, show up on the screen. As I passed a temporary speed limit sign in a construction zone, the display updated to the new limit.
A buzz on my wrist took us off the interstate miles before the main Paducah interchange and we slipped into town the back way. It was a long day of driving and zero pedaling – the tandem rode securely atop the new Subaru with the benefit of rack adapters. But our satellite-guided trip was off to a good start, blocks from the lively riverfront downtown on a Saturday night. We sat at the bar of the packed restaurant and Avery had his first steak.
A postprandial stroll offered a fabulous vista of sun-tinged clouds across the wide Ohio and on the water side of the flood wall, along with a few score of fellow citizens out to enjoy the temperate evening. We ambled around the requisite performing arts center and the decommissioned locomotive. Neither the River Discovery Center nor the Paducah Railroad Museum were open, thus sparing us from any unnecessary learning.
Instead we gassed up the Outback and returned to our Holiday Inn. Safe in our room with a view of the parking lot and the tandem secured atop the vehicle we watched sheets of rain pour down, setting what would become a common sequence – safe arrival at our destination followed by overnight storms pelting down while we remained high and dry.