Alone and Awheel from Chicago - San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, California · Sunday, August 01, 1897

Margaret Valentine (Cox) Le Long was 34 when she decided to ride her bike from Chicago to San Francisco, from the '20th of May to the 8th of July,' 1897. I haven't been able to find out much about her life, circumstances, or why she chose to ride from Chicago, just that she did it. I know her husband Charles F. Le Long stayed in San Francisco, because he was singing while she was riding. I do know she was a straight-shooter about bad coffee. She was a member of the all-female Falcon Bicycle Club in 1896, and there's some reports of her rides and shenanigans with other members of the club. The story of her ride is remarkable, and several people have written about her. (one two three) It was published on a full page of the San Francisco Chronicle, which I've transcribed and lightly researched, below. It was also published in published in Outing magazine, and the text of the two is different; the Outing version is longer, and contains illustrations. I've also transcribed it, but only researched the bits that aren't in the Chronicle version. It's below the Chronicle version. The introduction to the Chronicle printing is cringe-inducing, and shows the male viewpoint of 1897. You might skip it, look for the bold text beginning with "Hear, now, her story..." and start there. Read her words. I bet she was a really interesting person, and I would have like to have met her.

Alone and Awheel from Chicago

TO MEASURE the long, long way from Chicago to San Francisco with the circumference of a twenty-eight-inch wheel, to know every inch of the path over mountain and desert. to ford rushing streams with a shouldered wheel, to wear into shreds tough leather boots, to do all these, alone, through daylight and through darkness, being a woman and by heredity timid, needs as fine a quality of nerve and pluck and courage as it takes to climb the snowy passes of Alaskan mountains or to brave an Arctic winter.

On one of the ferry-boats. a week or two ago. some observant passengers noticed a slender little resolute piece of femininity, with a dusty wheel and a frayed bundle in a luggage carrier. The wheelwoman wore a natty brown jacket and short skirt, a fresh shirt waist, white chamois gloves, very spick and span, and tan boots worn full of holes, but none of them guessed that she had wheeled it alone all the way from Chicago, 2000 weary miles and more. 

The wheelwoman was Mrs. Margaret Valentine Le Long. She is a Californian by adoption, for she has lived in San Francisco full half her life. She ended to ride home from Chicago on her wheel not to save expense, for it costs twice as much as by rail, but for the sake of the adventure and the experience.

Plucky little Mrs. Le Long is five feet two, and her average weight is 114 pounds. She was from the 20th of May to the 8th of July doing it, and she had never an insult on the road, not a bad record for American manhood. 

At every place she applied for shelter she was kindly received, except at one Iowa farmhouse, where they were not sheltering lone wheelwomen. She never had a puncture and only one accident a broken pedal, when she had piled herself up at the foot of a hill in the dark. She did her own washing, had the good sense not to try for a record, and rested whenever she was tired. Eighty-six miles in one day was her best performance.

On the way she lost eight pounds, made a detour from Ogden to Salt Lake, rode the railroad track for numberless rough and bumpety miles, and walked on an average ten miles a day. She is muscular as few women are, and as brown as the proverbial berry, for she even tanned her hands through her thick chamois gloves. But she is not the least bit footsore or weary, and she would do it again in minute.

Mrs. Le Long knows the alkali desert as other women know their dooryards. She was not even afraid on this terrible waterless waste, although sometimes the road ended suddenly and didn't seem to begin again, and she knew if she once lost sight of the telegraph poles she was lost.

Sometimes she would have three good-sized streams to cross in a day, and she get so tired removing her shoes and stockings that finally she went through them clothes and all. 

She has brought from the alkali wastes the unquenchable thirst of the desert.

"My capacity for liquid refreshments is something enormous," she says.

Hear, now, her story in her own words, as she has written them for the "Chronicle":

In spite of the opposition of every friend and relative who was on hand to register a protest - those at a distance objected by mail - I proceeded with my preparations to wheel from Chicago to San Francisco. They consisted mainly of abbreviating my skirt and of having heavy soles put on my shoes. A small bundle tied up in oilcloth and containing a change of underwear, a few toilet articles and a clean "hanky," I strapped on my handle bars. I borrowed a pistol, which I finally put in my toolbag, where it would be hard to get at in case of need.

On the morning of May 20th I started amid a chorus of lamentations and prophecies of broken limbs, death from thirst and starvation, abduction by cowboys and scalping by Indians. Though my route for the first day was over the smooth, level roads of Illinois, I made only forty-three miles and went to bed in a suspicious looking bed in a dirty little country hotel rather discouraged. I had battled all day against head winds and had been sent miles out of my way by a facetious bumpkin, so I slept soundly in spite of lame knees and my suspicions regarding the bed, and was not at all ready to get up at 5 o'clock the next morning. Most of my second day I spent dodging showers and marveling at the roads. I had never learned to cycle along a gable roof, so some of my gyrations on those Illinois turnpike must have been highly entertaining to the farmers, who always stopped plowing to watch me go by.

One cold, bright morning I started out to make a "century," but I had counted without the wind or sand. After fifteen miles of alternate sand and mud, hill and bogs, and a cold wind blowing straight in m face, I decided to stop in the next town and spend the rest of the day expressing my opinion about League of American Wheelmen maps. Right here I wish to say that the league map of Iowa is a snare and a delusion. At my first glimpse of Homestead, the largest of the Amanna settlements, I forgot all about head winds, sandy roads and wicked maps. It was hard to believe I was still in the "land of the free and the home of the brave." Such quaint red brick houses, all as much alike as peas in a pod; such big, wide-winged windmills; such flaxen-haired little maedchens, with long-skirted, short-waisted gowns, queer, quilted hoods and kerchiefs demurely crossed in front and tied behind, surely were never seen anywhere outside of Holland. I rode slowly down the one long street, till my eyes were gladdened by the sight of a huge yellow sign, decorated with hump-backed, broken-kneed letters. In spite of a limited knowledge of Dutch I knew the letters spelled hotel. For five minutes I hammered on a nail-studded oak door with a huge brass knocker, and then I sat down on the steps to await developments, which finally arrived in the person of the fattest man I ever saw outside a circus. 1 followed him into a room that removed the last doubt in my mind as to what country I was in. It was certainly Holland. That bare, polished floor; those tiny diamond-shaped panes in the lattice (lattice, not window, mind you); that huge porcelain stove: the boxes of flaming tulips, were all Dutch. Mine host waved his pipe at me again, and I followed the gesture and my nose, and landed in a dining-room that fairly took my breath away, so picturesque and so odorous was it. The Amanna Society is co-operative In the fullest meaning of the word, and has been in active and successful operation for fifty-one years. Beginning with 3000 acres of unbroken Iowa prairie, they now own 57,000 acres, all under cultivation. From a few scattering log cabins has developed seven towns, with substantial stone and brick houses. Everything is community property, and the man who joins the society with only the clothes on his back has the same rights and consideration as the man who puts in thousands. The man who withdraws does so with just what he put in, whether it be the clothes he wears or thousands of dollars.

As the sun was taking his first peep over the brown plowed fields, where the tender green of the corn was just beginning to show, I trundled my wheel regretfully through the gate in the osage hedge.

Iowa is described in the guide books as a "fine rolling country." For the cycler this means that you roll your wheel up one side of a hill and down the other, with never a level spot to rest the sole of your foot. This is especially true of the western part. If one can forget his grievances against, the roads long enough to stop and admire, the scenery is beautiful beyond description.

What a relief to a weary, wheelman to cross the muddy Missouri and go skimming over the smooth gravel roads of Eastern Nebraska. In Iowa the road will go several miles out of its way to climb over a hill; in Nebraska it makes some attempt to go around.

I stopped one evening near Bennington, Neb., as the setting sun was turning the gray old world into fairy land, and shook my fist at the bluffs and black muck roads of Iowa. It didn't hurt Iowa and it relieved my feelings.

Eastern Nebraska is next door to paradise; Western Nebraska is hard by the other place.

Eastern Nebraska is thickly dotted with prosperous farms and towns, and every one is rejoicing at the prospect of bountiful crops this year. Western Nebraska was intended by nature for a cattle range, and as long as nature was allowed to have her own way, things went fairly well. When a rascally lot of real estate boomers tried to run nature out of a job the result was disaster and desolation. Nature retaliated by withholding even a sign of a crop of anything but Russian thistles for seven long, weary years, till the "homesteaders" had nearly all starved or emigrated. A few, with more credit and determination, have gone into partnership with nature and taken to stock-raising.

If some one should offer a prize for a picture of desolation, I would paint one of a deserted Nebraska "Soddy." For the benefit of the uninitiated I will explain that "soddy" is the Nebraskan term for a sod house. Even in the best of circumstances a "soddy" is a desolate object, but the poor, deserted "soddies," with the wind howling through the broken doors and windows, and flapping the remnant wings of the windmill, is a midday nightmare not soon forgotten.

From Cheyenne to Laramie is seventy-three miles by the road that follows the rallway fifty-two miles by the "Happy Jack" road. I made the mistake of taking the short cut.

This was the day when experience came to me in chunks. A 2000-foot rise in thirty miles and a thousand-foot drop in the other twenty-two miles is the record of the "Happy Jack" road. For twenty miles the road is good and the grade gradual, and then trouble begins. Up and down, in and out, over rocks and through sand runs the Happy Jack road. At every mile your breath comes harder and harder, and your knees grow weaker and weaker. There must have been a merry mix-up when that country was in course of construction.

Numerous dents, bruises and abrasions on myself and wheel mark the moments when I became lost in admiration of the wild grandeur of the scene, and forgot that I was riding a bucking bronco of a bicycle.

By 1 o'clock hunger was beginning to dim my enthusiasm for anything but dinner, and for fifteen long miles I hadn't seen a sign of human habitation nothing but greenish gray rocks and starving grayish green pines. 

A sudden turn of the road brought before me such a view that I nearly tumbled off my wheel in sheer admiration.

Rock piled upon rock for 400 feet straight up, and at the base a noisy little mountain stream, chattering along between green banks thickly fringed with purple flags and wild roses.

It was some time before I noticed the log cabin at the foot of the cliff right beneath a huge overhanging rock, that looked as though it needed but a push from a baby's hand to send it toppling over.

I didn't back pedal down that hill. [She likely rode what we call now a fixed-gear, and used reversed pressure on the pedals to reduce her speed, maybe with a brake - MF] The special providence that is appointed to care for fools must have had me in charge, for I landed at the bottom without breaking neck or wheel, though the two men who came out of the cabin seemed to think I ought not have a whole bone in my body. I was not asked to dismount I had already done that on all fours, with the wheel atop but I was invited in to dinner. with a cordiality peculiar to Wyoming. 

Mr. Shaw, the owner of the place, the famous "Cabin under the Rocks," cooked the dinner, scolding in a good-natured way because I hadn't arrived before the dinner was eaten and because there was nothing left but scraps. If that was a dinner of scraps then may I always dine upon scraps fresh antelope steaks, jerked antelope meat, mountain trout, caught in front of the door, and canned peaches from my own beloved California, all washed down with milk that would delight a Dockery. 

And drew on for Laramie. A long, steep hill with a barbed wire gate strung across it half way down; a barrel hoop in the middle of the road and a badger hole at one side. Thirty seconds later add to the scene on one side of the road a woman all of a heap; on the other a pea green bicycle and down by the gate a brown hat and white veil. I lay and stared at the sky for a while before I dared move, then began carefully to wiggle first one leg and then the other. They were not broken, but oh, how they hurt! I sat up and began to cry and then I laughed. I braced up, took a hairpin out of my hair and picked the gravel stones out of my knees and cried some more, got up and straightened my handle bars, put on my hat wrong side before, wiped my eyes on my veil, and started again. If I saw the road through a mist of tears was I to blame?

Eight more miles I made somehow, just how I don't know; then the house I had despaired of finding that night. Visions of supper, bed and bandages were fitting through my mind, only to flit out again. "No," the man milking in the cowyard said, "they had just moved there. Had no beds. It was twelve miles to Laramie. No houses between. Wouldn't drive over that road after dark for the price of a broncho. Would hitch up and take me to a house on another road. Thought likely the folks would keep me over night."

Behind two balky half-broken bronchos, in a wagon without springs, away we went over bowlders that jolted me off the seat down on my lame knees into the bottom of the wagon; through canyons black with the shadows of night we tore; through passes where the rocks seemed to meet over our heads and up over ridges where we lost all trace of the road and crashed along over sagebrush and bowlders.

Twinkling lights almost beneath us, the yelping of dogs and a chorus of profanity that shocked even my Western ears, told us that our arrival had been noted at Cazan's cattle ranch. [In the two issues of Outing, the ranch is called "Cazorus" and "Cazoni." I can't find it. - MF] Kindly hands lifted me from the wagon and carried me into the loghouse, which contained but two rooms, large, clean and comfortable but utterly devoid of the little decorations one expects to find where women abide. Three immense beds stood in three corners of the room, and a rough pine table and an assortment of guns, saddles and spurs adorned the fourth. Bandages, supper and sympathy I had, and to spare, though many a rough joke was cracked at my expense.

If there is a worse piece of road any where than the fifteen miles from Cazan's cattle ranch to Laramie a merciful Providence has never let me strike it. Five miles up, up to the top of Devil's hill; five miles down, down through the Devil's pass, where the wind blows like a blast from the furnaces of Hades; five miles of sand, sagebrush and mosquitoes, and then Laramie and civilization. I almost embraced the telegraph poles in my delight.

All through Nebraska and Wyoming I had been entertained with lurid tales of people being chased by wild cattle, but as I had never been able to meet any one who had been chased - it was always some friend or neighbor - I hadn't taken much stock in the stories. I had passed through herd after herd, and they had always turned tail and fled, bellowing, away at the sight of me. But this was my unlucky day. 

I had just waded through half a mile of marsh and was toiling slowly up a long, steep grade, when I saw a large herd scattered along and across my road. Instead of running at sight of me they began to round up. This looked serious, and I paused very suddenly for consideration. All the advice I had received on the cattle question was never to run away from them, but to go forward, waving your arms and shouting. This sounds very simple, sitting safely at home with your cattle before you in the shape of roast beef. It is a very different thing when facing a herd of pawing, bellowing cattle in the middle of a Wyoming cattle range, your knees knocking together and your heart making quick trips from your head to your heels and back again, every nerve tingling with a wild desire to run, and no place to run to. Forgetting my fear of the pistol in the greater fear of the cattle, which by this time were coming toward me with heads down and tails up, I put five shots into the herd as fast as I could pull the trigger. Scattering handkerchief, powder-box and curl papers to the winds, to get at the cartridges in the bottom of my chatelaine bag, I loaded as I ran and let the herd have a couple more shots, Away they went over the hill out of sight, and I hunted up my hand glass and sat down to see if my hair had turned gray. 

After this experience I began to yell like a Comanche Indian and shoot at sight of a herd of cattle. The next day I stampeded all the cattle in Rattlesnake pass.

Starting from Rockdale the next morning, all went well for a few miles. Then I ran into a Wyoming thunderstorm, or it ran into me. The black clouds began piling up on three sides of me in a way that was awe-inspiring, but not encouraging to a lone woman without an umbrella. Great, bold, black mountains loomed above me on all sides. At every lightning flash I put on a little extra speed, but seemed to be making about as much headway as one does in a nightmare. A prairie dog peeped out of its hole and barked, and a snake crawled across my path. 

[Here is a map of the place names Margaret mentions, as best I can understand them. She followed the route of what is now Highway 80. - MF]

I had almost fallen upon the roof of Pullman's ranch at Medicine Bow crossing before I saw it. I was none too soon, for the big rain drops were playing a tattoo on my hat brim as I reached the door. I stayed here for dinner, and waited till the storm had drifted away north. I knew it was impossible for me to reach Fort Steele before night, but I was told there were a number of ranches fifteen miles beyond on the other side of Rattlesnake pass. The fifteen miles had stretched into twenty-two, in true Wyoming style, before I saw a house. I had to take off my shoes and stockings three times in less than a mile to wade Rattlesnake creek. Coming suddenly out of the pass into the plain I saw six ranches, three on each side of the road. One of the beauties of Wyoming is the deceptive distances. I rode and rode, and walked and pushed my wheel through the sand, and the ranches seemed as far away as ever. The sun was going down before I reached the first one. It was deserted. On again to the next. Deserted also."Three times and out," I thought, as I started for the third. Here I was more fortunate. I had struck the Pass creek sheep ranch, owned by a Boston syndicate. Here I was royally entertained, and the next morning taken in a wagon seven miles upon my way, because Pass creek was too high for me to ford. At Fort Steele I had to cross the Platte river on the railroad bridge, and when I got over I sat down and watched the world whirl. Here is the beginning of the Red desert. I rode the railroad track most of the way, for the road is sandy and in places indistinct.

To get lost on the Red desert is almost sure death, and I preferred to take the chance of being scooped up by a passing train. To look at the map of Wyoming one would think it a thickly settled country. Had I known how many of those names that loom large on the map stand only for side tracks and section-houses I fear I would never have had the heart to make the trip. This was the place where my water bottle and luncheon box came handy. I never actually suffered for water, as I soon learned to find the places where the section men bury their water barrels. To get something to eat was not always so easy.

At Bryan, which consists of a section-house and a depot, I could not get a bite for love or money, though I was there just at dinner time and could smell the bacon frying. At both houses I had the door shut in my face.

Ordinarily I would have thought the country around Evanston desolate, but after 200 miles of Red desert even green 2 sagebrush was welcome. The beautiful towns and green fields of the Weber canyon seemed little short of Paradise. Think of sixty-five miles of down grade, ye weary wheelmen! Such is the road from Wasatch to Ogden. There is just one objection to that country from my point of view - they don't bridge their creeks, and they turn their irrigation ditches loose all over the road. I was rescued one morning from a maze of creeks and mud puddles by two young men in a wagon. They had been on a camping and fishing expedition and lo were on their way back to Ogden. They had 400 trout in a box under the seat, and were going to stop and cook some for dinner. I must have looked hungry (I generally was), for they invited me to dinner. I didn't need two invitations. We made camp beneath the railroad bridge at Devil's Gate. There was no bread, and I was unanimously elected to make biscuit. Now, I can make biscuit, but I want all the modern improvements in the way of utensils. Here I had neither mixing board, rolling pin, flour sifter or biscuit cutter, so I take credit to myself that those biscuit were eatable at all. It was dark when we reached Ogden, and I was glad of it, for I was badly in need of repairs. For two days I did little besides rest and eat ice cream and fruit. Then I took a run down to Salt Lake City. Here I found everything in a whirl of preparation for the Christian Endeavorers and the jubilee. It is forty miles from Ogden to Salt Lake City and double that distance from Salt Lake City to Ogden. If you don't believe it make the trip on a wheel and see. I suppose a mile is a mile according to scientific measurement, but I have found some difference between a mile down hill and a mile uphill.

At Corinne, Utah, I bade adieu once more to green fields and civilization. I was fortunate in having cool weather nearly all the way across the American desert - in fact, I encountered several heavy rain storms. Sand and sagebrush day after day, with an occasional sand or rain storm to vary the monotony wasn't interesting riding and wouldn't make interesting reading.

The Indians are the only picturesque part of the scenery, and they have been rendered almost useless from an artistic point of view by their store clothes. But the dear little brown-faced babies are still untouched by civilization. They stare stolidly at the world from beneath the wicker hoods of their cradle boards, utterly Indifferent to the flies and mosquitoes that swarm over their dirty little faces. 

The mothers don't bother them with Soap and water, but they guard them carefully from the snapshots of the tourist camera fiend. 

In crossing the Great American Desert I would advise any one to stick closely to the railroad. The wagon track has a habit of disappearing in the most unaccountable manner, and if you are out of sight of the telegraph poles you are lost. My greatest fear, though, was of tramps. The road fairly swarmed with them, and they were generally of the Weary Willle type. While they were never really impudent, they sometimes displayed an interest in my affairs that was unpleasant, but as I was a sort of tramp myself I couldn't put on too many airs.

From Reno to San Francisco the roads are good, the scenery beautiful and the water like wine after the alkali of the plains. At every turn of the wheel I felt my spirits rise, and when I finally crossed the State line and stepped once more on California soil I wept a little weep for joy.

You who have had only tantalising glimpses through the cracks of the snowsheds, know but little of the beauty of the scenery between Blue canyon and Truckee. It amply repaid me for the many miles I had to push my wheel up the long, steep hills. From Gold Run down the road is one to do a weary cycler's heart good.

But what is the use trying to describe scenes familiar to you all. They had also been familiar to me for years, but after my long absence, and journey through strange and barren places, they seemed wonderfully new and beautiful to me. The Oakland Mole seemed the entrance to paradise and San Francisco as paradise itself.

To my cycling sisters I wish to say that I rode a drop-frame wheel, and never once found the time or place where I was willing to doff my skirts and appear in bloomers.

I find a short skirt, properly cut, just as easy to ride in as bloomers, I was invariably treated with kindness, and courtesy, and I attribute a great deal of it to my skirts. Leather shoes laced to the knee I have found to be the neatest and most comfortable footwear.

I acquired a fine copper-colored complexion, and lost eight pounds of flesh that I couldn't afford to spare, but I am glad I made the trip, though I don't want to make it again - this summer.

MARGARET V. LE LONG

M. V. Le Long--August 1, 1897 San Francisco Chronicle--original newspaper article 01 Aug 1897, Sun San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California) Newspapers.com

M.V. Le long--Original Chronicle article page 2 01 Aug 1897, Sun San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California) Newspapers.com

Here is the same story, but the text is from Outing magazine's two issues, and it contains more of her original text. The Chronicle version is edited down to a shorter piece.

FROM CHICAGO TO SAN FRANCISCO AWHEEL

BY MARGARET VALENTINE LE LONG. 

IN spite of the opposition of every friend and relative who was on hand to register a protest (and those at a distance objected by mail) I proceeded with my preparations for riding awheel from Chicago to San Francisco. They were few and simple, consisting mainly of a suitable skirt, and in having heavy soles put on my shoes. A change of underwear, a few toilet articles, and a clean “hanky” I strapped on my handle-bars, and a pistol, which I borrowed, I put in my tool-bag, where it would be hard to get at it in case of need. And so one morning in May I started midst a chorus of prophecies of broken limbs, starvation, death from thirst, abduction by cowboys, and scalping by Indians. 

Although my route at the outset was over the smooth level roads of Illinois, I had to battle all day against head winds, was sent miles out of my way by a facetious country bumpkin, and made only forty-three miles. I went to rest that first night out in a suspicious looking bed in a dirty little country hotel, rather discouraged. In spite of lame knees and my suspicions regarding the bed, I slept soundly, and was not at all ready to get up at five o’clock next morning, the hour at which, in a wild determination to get up before the wind, I had arranged to be called. 

Let none flatter themselves they can get up before an Illinois wind, for it blows all day, and it blows all night, and it always blows straight in your face. 

I spent most of my second day dodging showers and saying uncomplimentary things about the roads; and some of my gyrations on those Illinois turnpikes must have been highly entertaining to the farmers, for they stopped plowing to watch me. 

The third day was bright and cold, and I started out with the firm determination to make a “century,” but I had counted without the wind and sand. After fifteen miles of alternate sand and mud, hills and bogs, and a cold wind blowing, of course, straight in my face, I decided to stop in the next town and spend the rest of the day expressing my opinion about the League map of Iowa, which is a snare and a delusion. 

At my first glimpse of Homestead, the largest of the Amanna settlements, I forgot all about head-winds, sandy roads, and League maps. It was hard, indeed, to believe that I was still in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” 

Such quaint red brick houses, all as much alike as peas in a pod; such big, wide-winged windmills; such flaxen-haired little mädchens, with long-skirted, short-waisted gowns, queer quilted hoods, and kerchiefs demurely crossed in front and tied behind, surely were never seen anywhere outside of Holland. 

I rode slowly down the one long street till my eyes were gladdened by the sight of a huge yellow sign decorated with hump-backed, broken-kneed letters that, in spite of a very limited knowledge of Dutch, I knew spelled hotel. The sign was the only hotel-like thing about the place. I passed through a neat picket gate in the osage hedge, and walked between trim geometrical tulip-beds up white stone steps, that I would have been perfectly willing to have my dinner served on, and spent the next five minutes hammering on a nail-studded oak door with a huge brass knocker, that would soon have demolished one of our flimsy factory-made doors. 

I found it was no use trying to hurry a member of the Amanna Society, or to bang down their doors, so I sat down on the steps to await developments. They were slow in coming, but I could hear them, which was encouraging. They finally arrived, in the person of the fattest man I ever saw outside of a circus.

"NEITHER SPOKE."

Visions of beer advertisements, circus posters, and the refrain of an old song, chased one another through my mind while we stood and gazed upon each other, for that was all we did for some time. Neither spoke. He from lack of breath; I from sheer astonishment. I finally stammered out a request for dinner, and a place to sit till it was served. He uttered no word of assent or welcome, but removed from his mouth a long-stemmed, red-tasseled pipe, whose bowl had been reposing on the pit of his stomach, waved it in the air, and, turning ponderously around, rolled (yes, that is the right word) down the stone-flagged hall. 

I followed him into a room that removed the last doubt from my mind as to what country I was in. I was certainly in Holland. That bare, polished floor; those tiny, diamond shaped panes in the lattice (lattice, not window, mind you), those boxes of flaming tulips, that huge porcelain stove, were all Dutch. They were very Dutch. I felt myself in my short skirt and leather leggins, to be a blot upon the picture, and tried to efface myself as much as possible by sitting very close in the corner of the big oak settle that filled my artistic soul with covetousness. 

Just as I had mentally got that settle placed in the hall of the house which I am going to build some day, mine host rolled once more into view, and waved his pipe at me again. I followed his gesture and my nose, and landed in a dining-room that fairly took my breath away, so picturesque and so odorous was it. 

After fifteen years’ experience in San Francisco restaurants from the water front to the Cliff House, and from North Beach to the Protrero, I considered that I had eaten of everything known to civilization, and a good deal that wasn’t. I had always prided myself upon having a thoroughly cosmopolitan stomach, but I had a new dish sprung upon me that day that was a little too much for me. At one end of the table was a bowl filled with something that filled me with pleasant anticipations of some real old-fashioned “Floating Island” pudding. 

Mine host ladled out a goodly portion with a silver ladle that made me feel incipient kleptomania tingle in my finger tips. I thought it a little queer to begin the dinner with the dessert, but concluded as I was in Holland to do as the Hollanders did. It didn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t. Nothing but the memory of a sound whipping my mother had once given me for spitting out something I didn’t like, prevented me from doing likewise now. I was incapable of speech, but my face must have been an interrogation point, for mine host waved his pipe toward the bowl, and said, “Bier.” “What!” I gasped, “beer soup?” “Yaw,” he answered, with a look that plainly said his opinion of me had gone down several notches. A bad beginning sometimes makes a good ending, and this was one of the sometimes. The rest of the dinner made ample amends for the beer soup. 

After dinner I went in search of information, for there was none to be had around the hotel. The women only giggled in answer to my questions; the children hid behind the women, and the men stared. 

I wended my way down the elm-shaded street to the little brown railroad station where I made the acquaintance of the telegraph operator, the ticket agent, and the baggage-master. For the sake of convenience and economy these are all comprised in one person. I found him to be a fountain of knowledge upon Amanna Society affairs, both public and private. 

These are some of the things I learned. The Amanna Society is co-operative in the fullest meaning of the term, and has been in successful operation for fifty-one years. Beginning with three thousand acres of unbroken Iowa prairie, they now own fifty-seven thousand acres, all under cultivation. From a few scattering log cabins have developed seven towns, with substantial stone and brick houses. Everything is community property, and the man who joins the society with only the clothes on his back has the same rights and consideration as the man who puts in thousands. The man who withdraws does so with just what he put in. Each male member receives thirty dollars per year spending money, in addition to his living; each female member, twenty dollars. This sum they are entitled to spend as and where they please, but permission to leave the settlement must be granted by the council. 

All business of the Amanna Society is transacted by the council, and the purchase of even a sheep or a keg of beer is a task requiring much time and patience. One would think all that was necessary was the proper amount of greenbacks and negotiations with the head shepherd or brewer. These are but preliminary steps. It involves consulting every member of the council, from the shepherd to the president, and back again. Until within the last two years Dutch was the only language taught in their schools, and it was nothing unusual to meet middle-aged men and women who had been born and raised in one of the settlements unable to speak English. 

I am afraid their laws for the management of lovers would not find favor among our American youth. If a young man shows a more than brotherly interest in one of the pretty blonde mädchens, and she shows a disposition to be more than a sister to him, an investigation is immediately made, and if he declares his intentions serious - other things, such as parents, being propitious - he is allowed a farewell interview with the maiden, and then hustled away to one of the other settlements, there to stay one year to prove the strength of his attachment. If his intentions are not. serious, he is hustled off just the same, but without the farewell interview. Every May-day all the unappropriated maidens, dressed in their Sunday gowns, are loaded into gaily decorated wagons, and, blushing and giggling, are taken the rounds of the settlements for the inspection and selection of the unattached men. 

As the sun was taking his first peep over the brown plowed fields where the tender green of the corn was just beginning to show, I trundled my wheel regretfully through the gate in the osage hedge. Mine host waved his pipe in solemn farewell, and the last sound that fell upon my ears as I rode out of Homestead was the croupy gurgle of the water in the bowl as he drew a long, strong puff of relief. 

Iowa is described in the guide-books as a “fine, rolling country.” For the cycler this means that you roll your wheel up one side of a hill and down the other, with never a level spot between to rest the sole of your foot upon. This is especially true of the western part. If you can forget your grievances against the roads long enough to stop and admire, the scenery is beautiful beyond description. 

What a relief to a weary wheelman to cross the muddy Missouri and go skimming over the smooth gravel roads of Nebraska. In Iowa the road will go several miles out of its way to climb a hill; in Nebraska it makes some attempt to go around. 

1 stopped one evening near Bennington as the setting sun was turning this grey old world into fairyland, and shook my fist at the black muck roads and bluffs of Iowa. It didn’t hurt lowa and it relieved my feelings. 

Eastern Nebraska is next door to Paradise; Western Nebraska is next door to the other place. 

Eastern Nebraska is thickly dotted with prosperous farms and towns, and everyone was rejoicing at the prospect of bountiful crops this year. Western Nebraska was intended by nature for a cattle range, and as long as nature was allowed to have her own way things went fairly well. When a rascally lot of real estate boomers tried to run nature out of a job, the result was disaster and desolation. Nature retaliated by withholding even a sign of a crop of anything but Russian thistles, for seven long weary years, till the poor "Homesteaders" had nearly all starved or emigrated. A few with more credit and determination have gone into partnership with nature and taken to stock-raising. 

If someone should offer a prize for a picture of desolation I would paint one of a deserted Nebraska “soddy.” For the benefit of the uninitiated I will explain that “soddy” is Nebraskan for sod-house. Nature does what she can to soften their bare hideousness by filling the chinks with weeds and grasses, but even under the best of circumstances a “soddy” is a desolate object. The poor deserted "soddies" with the wind howling through the broken doors and windows, and flapping the remaining wings of the windmill, is a mid-day nightmare not soon forgotten. 

Leaving Gothenberg late one morning, I found myself at dinner-time in the heart of a soddy district and a deserted one at that. I had ridden up to a half a dozen only to find them deserted and no chance for even a drink of water. 

Hungry and tired I paused at the top of a hill and saw at the bottom of the “draw” (which is Nebraskan for hollow) a “soddy,” a hay-stack, and a cow. This was encouraging and I lost no time in making a closer inspection. An old woman with bare feet, and a face like badly tanned leather, was feeding some pigs by the door. I told her I wanted something to eat - anything, everything she had. 

She muttered something which I took to mean that she didn’t understand English, so I pointed to my mouth, patted my stomach, and grinned. A glimmer of comprehension flickered for a moment among the wrinkles, then she started for the house. So did I. This was quite a pretentious “soddy,” for it had two rooms. My hostess had disappeared into the inner one, from which she presently emerged with the addition to her toilet of a pair of stout rawhide shoes and a gingham apron. 

Upon the table she placed a big brown crock filled with milk, and a big brown loaf to keep it company. The milk had a strong flavor of sage-brush, and the bread was heavy and sour, but I had a bicycler’s appetite, sharpened by a Nebraska wind. It was only after much pantomimic argument that induced her to take any payment, and the quarter she finally accepted hardly eased my conscience when I remembered the bread and milk I had put out of sight. 

From Cheyenne to Laramie is seventy-three miles by the road that follows the railway - fifty-two miles by the “Happy Jack” road. I made the mistake of taking the short cut. This was the day that I acquired my experience in chunks. 

A two thousand foot rise in thirty miles, and a thousand foot drop in the other twenty-two miles is the record of the “Happy Jack” road. For twenty miles the road is good, and the grade gradual, then trouble begins. Up and down, in and out, over rocks and through sand runs the Happy Jack road, and at every mile your breath comes harder and your knees grow weaker. There must have been a merry mix-up when that country was in course of construction. 

Numerous dents, bruises, and abrasions on myself and wheel mark the moments when I became lost in admiration of the wild grandeur of the scene, and forgot that I was riding a bucking bronco of a bicycle.

By one o’clock hunger was beginning to dim my enthusiasm for anything but dinner, and for fifteen long miles I hadn’t seen a sign of a human habitation. Nothing but greenish-grey rocks and starved-looking greyish-green pines. A sudden turn of the road brought before me such a view that I nearly tumbled off my wheel in sheer awe and admiration. Rock piled upon rock for four hundred feet straight up, and at the base a noisy little mountain stream, chattering along between banks fringed with purple flags and wild roses. 

It was some time before I noticed the log-cabin at the foot of the cliff, right beneath a huge overhanging rock that looked as though it needed but a push from a baby’s hand to send it toppling over. I didn’t back-pedal down that hill. The special Providence appointed to care for fools must have had me in charge, for I landed at the bottom without breaking neck or wheel, though the two men who came out of the cabin seemed to think I ought not to have a whole bone in my body. 

I was not asked to dismount. I had already done that on all fours, with the wheel on top, but I was invited in to dinner, with true Wyoming hospitality. Mr. Shaw, the owner of the place, the famous “Cabin Under the Rocks,” cooked the dinner, scolding all the time, in a good-natured way, because I had not arrived sooner, and there was nothing left but scraps. If that was a dinner of scraps, then may I always dine upon scraps. Fresh antelope steaks, mountain trout, caught in front of the door, and canned peaches from my beloved California, all washed down with milk that had never known the pump. 

After dinner I found myself once more in a mood to enthuse, and I oh-ed and ah-ed till the sun was too far down the western horizon to suit me. Mr. Shaw had consoled me by saying that half way between the cabin and Laramie was the "Dirty Woman’s Ranch," and if night overtook me I could stay there. 

"A RUNAWAY."

A long, steep hill, with a barbed-wire gate strung across it half way down; a barrel-hoop in the middle of the road, and a badger hole at one side. Thirty seconds later add to the scene on one side of the road a woman, all of a heap; on the other a pea-green bicycle, and down by the gate a brown hat and white veil. I carefully wiggled around and found no bones were broken, then sat up and began to cry. Then I laughed, but the laugh had a hysterical sound, and I quit. There is no use having hysterics all alone, eight miles from the nearest house. I wonder what women would do without hairpins. I took one out of my hair and picked the gravel out of my knees, and cried some more; got up and straightened my handle-bar, put on my hat wrong side before, wiped my eyes and started again. I will confess that for several miles I saw the road through a mist of tears. Eight more miles I made somehow - just how I don’t know - then the house I had despaired of finding that night came in sight. 

Visions of supper, bed, and bandages flitted through my mind only to flit out again. “No,” the man milking in the cow-yard said; they had just moved there. Had no beds. It was twelve miles to Laramie. No houses between. Wouldn’t drive over that road after dark for the price of a bronco. Would hitch up and take me to a house on another road. Thought likely the folks there would keep me "over night." This was bad, but better than spending the night among the rocks. 

Behind two bucking, half broken broncos, in a wagon without springs away we went - away we went over boulders that jolted me off the seat down on to my poor, lame knees, into the bottom of the wagon. Every time the driver slowed up, in response to my agonized plea for a moment’s rest, the broncos bucked. Down we went into canyons, black with shadows of night, through passes where the rocks seemed to meet over our heads; up over ridges, where we lost all trace of the road, and crashed along over sage brush and boulders. 

Twinkling lights almost beneath us, the yelping of dogs, and a chorus of profanity, told us that our arrival had been noted at Cazorus' cattle ranch. Down we went, I with both feet bracing against the dash-board, and a silent prayer in my heart, the broncos kicking, and the driver swearing. 

Rough, but kindly, hands lifted me from the wagon, and carried me into the log house, which contained but two rooms, large, clean, and comfortable, but utterly devoid of the little decorations one expects to see where women abide. The white-wash had peeled in patches from the walls, and the smoke had colored what remained to the same color as the logs. There were no closets, so the family wardrobe festooned the walls and ceiling. Three immense beds occupied three corners of the room, and a rough pine table, and an assortment of guns, saddles, and spurs adorned the fourth.

Bandages, supper, and sympathy I had, and to spare, though many a rough joke was cracked at my expense. 

I was beginning to make some anxious speculations in regard to beds, when two of the boys dragged in a tick filled with hay. Anna, the daughter of the house, added two feather ticks, and told me my bed was ready. I looked around in consternation, and saw the family in various states of undress. The old gentleman was muttering melodious German oaths. The beys in fighting costume were having a friendly scrap. Anna seemed to understand my embarrassment, and took the candle into the kitchen. Under cover of the friendly darkness, I crawled in between the ticks.

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ALONE AND AWHEEL, FROM CHICAGO TO SAN FRANCISCO. 

BY MARGARET VALENTINE LE LONG.

(Concluded from February.)

MY kindly hosts at Cazoni's Ranch would not hear of my departure, though after a hearty breakfast of bacon, coffee, and bread, I was ready for another start. I must have a longer rest. I must see them brand the calves, and Gus was going to "bust a bronco." I drew the line at branding calves, but I was willing to see the bronco "busted."

Gus went to catch the bronco, and Anna and I to sympathize with the calves, though I did most of the sympathizing, Anna considering it proper and natural to brand calves. With a whoop and a bang, down the canyon came Gus and the bronco, or, rather, the bronco and Gus. The bronco was in the lead, and Gus was dangling along behind at the end of the lariat. "Head her off!" he yelled. But that wasn't my day for heading off broncos, and I made quick time to the top of the fence. When I had time to look again, the bronco was down on her knees, with one end of a lariat around her fore-foot, and Anna winding the other end around a post. It is one thing to catch a bronco, another thing to get the saddle on; still another to get on yourself, and, above all else, to stay on.

The saddle was finally on. So was the boy; though he must have got on while I winked, for I didn't see him do it. In and out among rocks and stumps went boy and bronco. Sometimes he was on her neck, sometimes on her flanks, but he was always on.

"I CLIMBED DOWN THE OTHER SIDE."

I sat on the top of a tall rail fence, and didn't feel any too safe then. The bronco tried all the usual bronco tricks (and their name is legion) to unseat her rider. She bucked, and the sharp rowels of the spurs dug her sides till the blood dripped. She tried to run, and the cruel Spanish bit gripped her throat. She rolled, and both spur and bit tortured her.

At last she rolled over on her side. "Now," panted the triumphant boy, "she's busted."

"What's the use talkin' like that," said Anna; "she's a sorrel; she won't stay busted."

I climbed down on the other side of the fence, and proceeded to get my own bronco ready for a start.

Anna, upon a nervous little bay mare, which she assured me she had "busted," accompanied me several miles.

If there is a worse piece of road anywhere than the fifteen miles from Cazoni's Ranch to Laramie, a merciful Providence has never permitted me to strike it.

Five miles up, up to the top of Devil's Hill; five miles down, down through the Devil's Pass, where the wind blows like a blast from the furnace of Hades; five miles of sand, sage-brush, and mosquitoes, and then Laramie.

A day's rest, and then, not profiting by my recent experience, I took another short cut. By this time I had developed a positive mania for getting on the wrong road, so I made inquiries of all the cyclers and old pioneers in Laramie, wrote down their directions, drew maps of the country, and then took the wrong road. It landed me on the banks of an alkali lake, and ended there. I scrambled around through the sage-brush, to see if it came out anywhere on the other side, but could find no trace of it. Remembering the old proverb about all things coming to one who waits, I sat down and waited. A man in a wagon came to me. I asked him where the road had gone. He replied that I was standing in the middle of it. After considerable argument, he acknowledged that it wasn't "any great shakes of a road, nohow," and kindly helped me into the wagon and took me back to the top of the hill, where I could see the other road about two miles away. Having implicit confidence in the puncture-proof qualities of my tires, I cut across lots through the cactus and sand, and reached Fee's Ranch in time for dinner. The dinner problem is a serious one in Wyoming, where the houses are twenty miles apart and the roads don't permit scorching.

All through Nebraska and Wyoming I had been entertained with lurid tales of people being chased by wild cattle, but as I had never been able to meet anyone who had been chased-it was always some friend or neighbor I hadn't taken much stock in the stories. I had passed through herd after herd, and they had always fled away bellowing at sight of me. But this was my unlucky day.

I had just waded through half a mile of marsh, and was toiling up a long, steep grade, when I saw a large herd scattered along and across my road. Instead of running at sight of me, they began to round up. This looked serious, and I paused very suddenly for reflection. All the advice I had received on the cattle question was, never to run away from them, but to go forward shouting and waving your arms. This sounds very simple sitting safely at home with your cattle before you in the form of roast beef. It is a very different thing when facing a pawing, bellowing herd of cattle in the middle of a Wyoming cattle range, your knees knocking together, and your heart making quick trips from your head to your heels and back again; every nerve tingling with a wild desire to run and no place to run to. Not a tree, a bush, a rock, or even a telegraph-pole.

Anyhow, this seemed to be a time for action, so, forgetting my fear of the pistol in my greater fear of the cattle, which by this time were coming toward me with heads down and tails up, I shut my eyes and let them have five shots as fast as I could pull the trigger. How weak and pitiful those shots sounded. I longed for a cannon, a Krupp gun, anything that would make a terrible noise.

But my little pop-gun had done some execution, for the herd was once more running in circles, but further up the hill.

Scattering handkerchief, curl-papers, and powder-box to the winds to get at the cartridges in the bottom of my chatelaine bag, I loaded as I ran, and fired a couple more shots. Away the cattle went over the hill out of sight, and I hunted up my hand-glass and sat down to see if my hair had turned gray.

After this experience I began to yell like a Comanche Indian, and shoot at sight of a herd of cattle, and the next day stampeded all those grazing in Rattlesnake Pass.

Starting from Rochdale the next morning, all went well for a few miles; then I ran into a Wyoming thunderstorm, or it ran into me. The black clouds began piling up on three sides of me in a way that was beautiful, grand, awe-inspiring, but not encouraging to a lone woman without an umbrella.

Then the lightning began to flash, and there wasn't a place to hide my head. Great, bold, black mountains loomed above me on all sides, but they were as bald as the heads in the front rows in the orchestra. At every flash of lightning I put on a little extra speed, but seemed to make about as much headway as one does in a nightmare.

A prairie dog peeped out of its hole and barked, and a snake crawled across my path. This was encouraging, for it showed that I was not the only living thing in this world of whirling clouds and darting lightning.

They have a queer way in Wyoming of tucking their houses in out-of-theway places, and I had nearly fallen upon the roof of Pullman's Ranch at Medicine Bow Crossing before I saw it.

I was none too soon, for the big rain drops were playing a tattoo on my hat brim as I reached the door. I stayed here for dinner, and waited till the storm had drifted away north.

I knew it was impossible for me to reach Fort Steele before night, but I was told there were a number of ranches fifteen miles beyond, on the other side of Rattlesnake Pass. The fifteen miles had stretched into twenty-two before I saw a house. I had to take off my shoes and stockings three times in less than a mile to wade Rattlesnake Creek; so I was cold, tired, and in a very bad temper when I came suddenly out of the pass upon the plain and saw six ranches. 

One of the most annoying things about Wyoming is the deceptive distances. I rode and rode, and walked and pushed my wheel through the sand, and those ranches seemed as far away as ever. The sun was going down when I reached the first one, only to find it deserted. On again to the next. Deserted also. "Three times and out" I thought as I started for the third. Here I was more fortunate. I had struck the Pass Creek sheep ranch, owned by a Boston syndicate. Here I was royally entertained, and the next morning taken in a wagon seven miles on my way to Fort Steele, because Pass Creek was too high for me to ford. At Fort Steele the wagon bridge had been swept away by high water, so I had to cross the Platte River on the railroad bridge. When I got over I sat down and watched the world whirl. 

Here is the beginning of the Red Desert. I rode the railroad track most of the way, for the road is sandy and indistinct. To get lost on the Red Desert is almost certain death, and I preferred to take the chance of being scooped up by a passing train. 

To look at the map of Wyoming, one would think it a thickly-settled country. Had I known how many of those names that loom so large on the map stand only for side-tracks and section-houses, I fear I should never have had the courage to make the trip. This was the place where my water-bottle and luncheon-box came handy. I never actually suffered for water, as I soon learned to find the places where the sectionmen bury their water-barrels.

To get something to eat was not always so easy. At Bryan, which consists of a depot and a section-house, I could not get a bite for love or money, though I was there just at dinner time, and could smell the bacon frying. At both houses I had the door shut in my face. I had to make my dinnerless way to Granger, twenty-three miles further, in anything but a Christian frame of mind. After dinner I decided to forgive them. It is enough to make any one mean to live in that country. Of all the God-forsaken countries I ever saw, that is the worst. Even the sagebrush refuses to grow. I was astonished at the number of people I met traveling in prairie schooners, for I had supposed the days for that mode of travel long since past.

Ordinarily, I should have thought the country around Evanston desolate, but after two hundred miles of Red Desert even green sagebrush is welcome, and the beautiful towns and green fields of the Weber canyon seem little short of Paradise. Think of sixty-five miles of down grade, ye weary wheelmen! Such is the road from Wasatch to Ogden. There is just one objection to that country from my point of view - they don't bridge the creeks, and they turn the irrigation ditches loose all over the road. I was rescued one morning from a maze of creeks and mud-puddles by two young men in a wagon. They had been on a camping and fishing trip, and were on their way back to Ogden. They had four hundred trout in a box under the seat, and were going to stop and cook some for dinner. I must have looked hungry (I generally was), for they invited me to dinner. I didn't need two invitations. We made camp beneath the railroad bridge at Devil's Gate.

There was no bread, so I was unanimously elected to make biscuit. Now I can make biscuit, but I want all the modern improvements in the way of utensils. Here I had neither mixing-board, rolling-pin, flour-sifter, nor biscuit-cutter, so I take credit to myself that those biscuits were eatable at all. We baked them in a Dutch oven, and many burnt fingers and much merriment resulted from trying to get them out.

It was dark when we reached Ogden, and I was glad of it, for I was badly in need of repairs. For two days I did little besides rest and eat ice-cream and fruit; then I took a run down to Salt Lake City. It is forty miles from Ogden to Salt Lake City - double that distance from Salt Lake City to Ogden. If you don't believe it, make the trip on a wheel and see. I suppose a mile is a mile according to scientific measurement, but I have found considerable difference between a mile down hill and a mile up hill.

At Corinne, Utah, I bade adieu once more to green fields and civilization. I was fortunate in having cool weather nearly all the way across the Great American Desert; in fact, I encountered several heavy rain-storms. Sand and sage-brush day after day, with an occasional sand or rain storm to vary the monotony, was not interesting riding and would not make interesting reading. The Indians are the only picturesque part of the scenery, and they have been rendered almost useless, from an artistic standpoint, by their store clothes. 

TRAMPS ABROAD OF THE WEARY WILLIE TYPE.

In crossing the Great American Desert I would advise anyone to stick closely to the railroad. The wagon road has a habit of disappearing in the most unaccountable manner, and if you are out of sight of the telegraph poles you are lost. My greatest fear was of tramps. The road fairly swarmed with them, and they were generally of the Weary Willie type. While they were never really impudent to me, they sometimes displayed an interest in my affairs that was unpleasant, but as I was a sort of a tramp myself, I couldn't put on too many airs.

From Reno to San Francisco the roads are good, the scenery beautiful, and the water like wine after the alkali of the desert. At every turn of the wheel I felt my spirits rise, and when I finally crossed the State line and stepped once more on California soil I wept a little weep for joy.

You who have had only tantalizing glimpses through the cracks of the snow-sheds, know but little of the beauty of the scenery between Truckee and Blue Canyon. It amply repaid me for the many miles I had to walk and push my wheel up the long, steep hills. One day among the snow and rocks of the summit of the Sierras, the next spinning along through orchards of the Sacramento Valley where the trees were bending with their burden of fruit. Although the scenes around San Francisco bay had been familiar to me for years, they seemed wonderfully new and beautiful to me. The Oakland Mole seemed the entrance to Paradise, and San Francisco, Paradise itself.

To my cycling sisters I wish to say that I rode a drop-frame wheel, and never once found the time or place where I was willing to doff my skirts and appear in bloomers. I find a medium-short skirt, properly cut, just as easy to ride in as bloomers, and one certainly feels more comfortable in such a costume, when off one's wheel. I was always treated with kindness and courtesy, and I attribute a great deal of it to my skirts. Leather shoes laced to the knee I find to be the neatest and most comfortable footwear.

I acquired a fine copper-colored complexion, and lost eight pounds of flesh that I could ill afford to lose, but I am glad I made the trip, though I don't want to make it again-at least, not till a season has passed.

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