Bike

In preparation for this month long self-contained bicycle tour students do physical conditioning five days a week for two months leading up to the trip. Students also gather equipment and learn basic bike maintenance skills.

During the trip we live on the road, biking long days and camping out at night, fair weather or foul. We use no support vehicles, which means that the students haul all of the gear for the month up and down every hill on their heavily loaded bicycles. When difficulties arise the students know that they must find their own solutions as no support van is going to roll by to pick them up. The students who participate in this trip take on a great many responsibilities including daily shopping and cooking, navigation and camp chores.

The Natchez trip follows spring north up the Mississippi river valley, covering 1300 miles and six states in three and a half weeks. Starting in Natchez Mississippi among cypress swamps and southern mansions, we bike the length of the Natchez Trace Parkway north crossing into northern Alabama then encountering the steep rocky ridges and pine forests of Tennessee. We swing off the Trace just before Nashville and as we pedal through Kentucky and into southern Illinois the land continues to get hillier as we approach the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Finally we roll across the wide-open farmland of central Illinois and Iowa, home to Scattergood.