San Diego to St Augustine by bike

It was somewhere between Sanderson and Langtry that I understood: I was more in love with the desert than afraid of it. One of those awe-struck moments when you're compelled to stop and look; when you notice the early light entering the valley, flooding the sand and rock faces; when you see the mountain walls changing colour in the distance, deep oranges becoming purples in its shadows and far reaches; and when you realise this space isn't empty. It's full.

But that took time. That understanding didn't arrive until we'd crossed a thousand miles of climbing and wind and doubt. Let me start where it actually began — in San Diego, in September, with a spreadsheet and the question of whether our knees would hold.

Climbing the hill

To climb your way out of San Diego, going eastwards and uphill on a fully loaded touring bike, requires a little practice. In fact, quite a lot of practice. Somehow we hadn't done much of that, and we paid for it.

We did have a cunning plan. We'd flown into San Francisco with the bikes, rented a car, kept the bikes safely boxed, and spent some time with friends in nearby Walnut Creek. We then drove south to San Diego, which meant our first experience of the loaded bikes was not a gentle warm-up but the opening climb itself — the debt for all that skipped practice, collected in full on day one.

The plan itself wasn't good enough. We used the last of the rental car to book a motel at Alpine, already halfway up the Cuyamaca mountains, dropped our bags there, drove back down to the city, returned the car, and started riding — bags-free, for one afternoon at least. It was still real hard work. Even without the panniers, the climb back up to Alpine took everything we had. The second day exposed the rest of what the missed practice had cost us: we made it only as far as Pine Valley, a shorter day than planned and an honest one. But after that, what goes up must come down — and for a while, it did.

The fence, the dunes, and the river of stars

Descending toward El Centro, the border makes itself known before any sign does. The fence runs for miles alongside the road — not a wall in the imagined sense, more a long steel seam stitched across the desert, close enough from the bike to see the individual posts, far enough that its scale only reads properly from height, coming down off the hills. A cyclist on a paved road and a fence built to stop people crossing on foot occupy the same view for a while, and there is nothing neutral about riding past it.

The Imperial Sand Dunes follow, rising pale and improbably smooth against the flat scrub around them — the kind of landscape that photographs badly because a photograph can't carry the heat or the size.

Heat, and the state that contradicts itself

Arizona announces itself gradually and then all at once. Somewhere around Wickenburg the desert had become so ordinary a backdrop that it took a car park to make us look at it properly — cacti standing between the parking bays like the world's least concerned street furniture, entirely wild, entirely unbothered by the tarmac and the trolley bay beside them. It is one thing to know intellectually that you are cycling through desert; it is another to find the desert has simply moved in next to the supermarket.

Then Phoenix, which does not announce itself gradually at all. Riding into it from the west, the grid keeps going long after you expect a centre to arrive — Tempe to Superior is, on the map, "up the street with no end," and that is not much of an exaggeration from a saddle. What stopped us properly was Arizona State University's practice stadium at Tempe: air-conditioned, indoors, a controlled climate built specifically so that elite athletes never have to train in the heat we were currently cooking in. Outside, it was cooking. Inside, it was Tuesday in a mild English spring. The contradiction is the whole state in miniature — a landscape too hot for its own athletes to train in, solved not by adapting to the heat but by building a room that refuses to acknowledge it exists.

The tunnel

Between Superior and Globe there is a stretch of road we would both call, without needing to compare notes, the most dangerous few miles either of us has ridden in the United States.

The problem starts at the Queen Creek Tunnel: a four-lane highway tunnel, uphill, with no hard shoulder. A loaded touring bike climbs slowly at the best of times; inside the tunnel that slowness meets a second problem, invisible from outside it — drivers coming off bright Arizona sunlight into the tunnel's darker interior need a moment for their eyes to adjust, and a cyclist without a shoulder to retreat to is exactly what that moment costs.

It does not end at the tunnel mouth. The climb continues for close to three miles past it, still with no shoulder, still with traffic at speed, now on a road that curves enough, and is grown in enough at the verges, that a motorist coming round a bend has very little warning that a cyclist is there at all. For the better part of three miles, we were, in the most literal sense, hard to see.

We wrote to the Adventure Cycling Association and to the Arizona Department of Transportation about it afterwards. Neither of us is in the habit of writing to transport authorities. This is the one stretch of the whole ride that made us do it.

The green stretch

The days through Arizona and into New Mexico were long and hot, and for stretches at a time the only usable road was the wide paved shoulder of Interstate 10 toward Las Cruces. On one of them we found a family stopped with a flat tyre, pulled over, and helped change the wheel. On the same stretch, insects neither of us had ever seen before kept turning up at the roadside — large, locust-like creatures the locals call Mexican Generals — one more reminder that out here, everything, looked at closely enough, turns out to be a size or a kind you didn't expect.

Between Las Cruces and El Paso the desert briefly forgets itself. Pecan groves line the road in disciplined rows, irrigated a startling green against everything on either side — the Rio Grande's water doing exactly what desert water does wherever it reaches: turning scarcity into abundance, in strict rectangles, for as far as the irrigation extends and not a metre further. It lasts a matter of miles. The desert resumes as if it had never left.

Marfa, and the desert that changes you

After El Paso came Fort Hancock, and then the long haul toward Marfa — a climb so gradual it barely announces itself as one. No real grade to point to, just miles and miles of gently rising road that wear you down by duration rather than steepness.

Somewhere in that last stretch before town — call it ten miles out, though after that many hours in the saddle our sense of distance was never entirely to be trusted — something genuinely strange stood off to the side of the road: a huge white shape, tethered rather than parked, that looked for all the world like a small airship moored to the ground. It wasn't imagination. That stretch of US 90 carries a Tethered Aerostat Radar System site — a helium blimp winched up on a cable to watch for low-flying aircraft crossing the border, run at the time jointly by the Air Force and Customs (the year we rode through, 2013, turned out to be the very year that changed, when Customs and Border Protection took it over outright). Nothing about it explained itself from the road. It was just there, huge and silent, doing something official in the middle of nowhere.

West of Van Horn, on that same long run, a Prada store stands alone in the scrub — no town beside it, no other building for miles in either direction. It's real, in the sense that it isn't a photograph or a trick of the light: a permanent art installation, built at something like a third of a genuine store's scale, stocked with actual Prada shoes and handbags from the year it went up, deliberately never restocked and never opened. A fixed, slowly weathering monument to a kind of consumption with no possible customer out here — and genuinely funny, in the deadpan way the desert seems to specialise in. Riding past it on a loaded touring bike, having not seen a settlement in an hour, is as close as this trip came to the desert playing a joke on us.

Marfa itself, when we finally reached it, announced its character before we'd properly arrived: more art installations stood at the roadside on the approach into town, standalone pieces with no explanation and no ticket booth — the kind of thing that only makes sense once you know Donald Judd moved here in the 1970s and turned a small ranching town into one of the more improbable contemporary art destinations in America, home to the Chinati Foundation's permanent installations as much as to the Prada store standing alone in the desert. We were too tired to stop and look properly at any of it — an overnight stay, not the few days the town clearly deserved. It's the kind of place you leave meaning to come back to.

Then the stretch that mattered more than any of it: Sanderson to Langtry. This is Judge Roy Bean country — the saloon-keeper who declared himself "Law West of the Pecos" and ran his own courtroom out of the Jersey Lilly, a hundred and thirty years before we rode past the town that still keeps his name. Somewhere in that stretch a mountain lion crossed our path — there and then gone, the kind of sighting that changes how carefully you look at the desert for the rest of the day, and the rest of the trip.

By the time we reached Hondo, just west of San Antonio, Margaret's gears had failed properly — not a tune needed, a bike barely rideable. We rented a van, loaded both bikes in, and drove the rest of the way into the city. It took two bike shops to get it right. We took the delay as licence rather than setback, and gave ourselves an extra day in San Antonio to look around properly instead of passing through.

San Antonio

The Alamo is smaller than its reputation. That's not a criticism — it's a former mission chapel in the middle of a modern city, not the sprawling fortress the films imply, and the gap between the two is part of what makes standing in front of it worth doing. Thirteen days under siege in 1836, the defenders killed to the last man, and "Remember the Alamo" turned into the rallying cry that carried the rest of the Texas Revolution — all of that history compressed into a building you could walk around in a few minutes, now hemmed in by the city that grew up around it rather than the other way round.

The River Walk is the opposite kind of surprise: a whole second city street plan, one level down, where the San Antonio River is landscaped into a shaded, café-lined path below the traffic. After a stretch of Texas measured in empty miles and straight roads, arriving somewhere designed entirely around walking slowly next to water was its own kind of relief.

Mamou, and a town's two halves

Mamou is a Cajun music town before it is anything else — the kind of place that turns up in guidebooks for a single Saturday-morning dancehall and a Mardi Gras tradition, the Courir de Mamou, run on horseback through the surrounding rice country. We came for that reputation, and the main street more or less delivered it: a scatter of bars and cafés, French still audible in places, the low-key self-assurance of a town that knows exactly what it's known for.

There was a shoeshine chair at the entrance to the hotel where we stayed — old-fashioned, raised, the sort of fixture that was once common across the American South and, for much of its history, worked disproportionately by Black shoeshiners for a white or mixed clientele. I have no idea who worked that chair in 2013, or whether it meant anything by then; shoeshining had long since stopped belonging to any one racial group, and one chair in one hotel lobby proves nothing on its own. But it was the first thing that made me start looking more carefully at what else the town was arranged around.

What we didn't see, in the bars, the restaurants, or walking the main street, was a single Black American. The only part of Mamou where we did was the east side of town, reached on a trip to find a grocery store — a different street plan, a different town, ten minutes' ride from the one we'd just been drinking coffee in.

That kind of divide isn't accidental, and it isn't unique to Mamou. Cajun prairie towns like this one carry a documented history of racially segregated social life: dance halls across the region were, by one Louisiana state humanities account, "strictly segregated," with Black and white communities kept to separate venues even as Black Creole musicians shaped the music white audiences danced to. That split hardened into two parallel traditions that still run on largely separate tracks — Cajun music, made and mostly heard by white Cajuns; zydeco, made and mostly heard by Black Creoles — out of the same prairie, the same French, and, at points, the same songs. What we were told, more broadly, is that Louisiana's legal desegregation in the mid-1970s didn't so much end that separation as drive it underground, into exactly the kind of everyday, unsigned geography we rode into by accident: not a sign on a door, but a main street that reads as white and an east side that isn't on the tourist map.

A very long bridge

Louisiana measured itself in bridges as much as in miles. Near Simmesport we crossed the Mississippi itself — a very long bridge, the water beneath wide and brown and moving with more evident purpose than anything we'd ridden beside so far, the far bank taking long enough to arrive that there was time, on the bike, in the open air above all that water, to actually feel the scale of the river rather than just note it on a map.

The Trace, and the road to Florida

The official Southern Tier line doesn't take in the Tammany Trace, as best I can tell — but we wanted it, and left the marked route to ride it anyway. Thirty-one miles of paved, tree-shaded rail trail along the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, laid on a retired Illinois Central line through Abita Springs, Mandeville, Lacombe and Slidell: shade instead of scrub, water more or less always in view, a surface smooth enough that for once we barely had to think about the front wheel. After the desert, it felt less like a detour than a decision — a stretch of the trip we'd chosen for its own sake, rather than because the route required it.

From Slidell we headed straight for Biloxi and into Mississippi, bypassing whatever the official line does through that stretch instead.

Biloxi itself, arriving off the Trace, didn't ask for much attention and didn't get much. A late-summer tourist city by the water, a good deal of concrete, not much that held us. Not every stop on a ride like this one earns a story, and it would be dishonest to invent one for a place that, on the day, simply didn't.

Mississippi held us for two days, Alabama for one — crossed into on the Dauphin Island ferry across Mobile Bay, a boat that does in twenty minutes or so what the roads around Mobile itself would have cost the best part of an afternoon.

Then it was Florida, and Florida, from the saddle, felt like a different proposition. Passing motorists gave us less room than anywhere else on the ride, or so it seemed at the time — though it's equally possible the shoulders themselves were simply narrower here than what we'd grown used to further west, and we were reading a change in the road as a change in temperament. Either way, we noticed it, every day, for six days — which is how long it took to reach Tallahassee, where we had friends waiting: a day off the bikes, and a proper look around the city, before getting back on the road. Resuming from there, the next thing on the map was Greenville.

Greenville, and a name that travels

Greenville, Florida is a small town in the state's quiet agricultural inland — a long way, in feel as much as miles, from the coast most visitors come for. It would be an easy place to ride straight through without a second look, except for one thing: it raised Ray Charles.

He was born in Georgia, but it was Greenville where he spent his boyhood, and Greenville where, as a young child, his sight began to fail. The town has kept faith with him since — a statue in his honour went up in 2005, and his childhood home has been restored and marked. What the town's own history doesn't let you forget is where his story went next: once he lost his sight, he was sent to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, to learn braille, and the piano, in St. Augustine — the same town this whole ride was, without either of us planning it that way, quietly aimed at all along.

There's a statue of him in the town park, and we did what everyone presumably does: stood next to it and got a photo taken. I'd seen the real thing once, years before, at a concert in London — amazing musician, legs flying all over the place at the piano, the kind of performer you don't quite believe until you've watched him do it. Standing next to the bronze version, in the small Florida town that made him, was its own strange kind of full circle.

The last miles

Somewhere past Gainesville the trip quietly stopped being about noticing things. There was one exception: sixteen easy, paved miles between Gainesville and Hawthorne, an old Atlantic Coast Line rail corridor turned bike path, running through Paynes Prairie and the wetlands beyond it — flat, shaded, about as gentle a stretch of riding as the whole route had offered, and appreciated precisely because by then we were in no state to appreciate much of anything. Tired, hungry, and single-minded, we weren't taking in Florida any more. We just wanted St Augustine.

St Augustine

Reaching St Augustine was utter joy — the uncomplicated kind, the kind that doesn't need explaining to anyone who has ever finished something long on their own legs.

There was just one problem left to solve, and it was a good one: finding the Atlantic. St Augustine's old town sits on the mainland side of the Matanzas River, not directly on the open ocean, and the real Atlantic — a beach we could actually dip a wheel, or ourselves, into — was across the water on Anastasia Island. So the very last task of a three-thousand-mile ride was a practical one: find a bridge, find a beach, and get both bike and rider properly wet, because a finish that stops short of the water isn't really a finish at all.

Waiting for us, a day ahead of schedule, were friends we'd made along the road — people who'd shared enough of the route with us over the previous weeks to count as more than acquaintances by the time we all converged on the same small city. They had a bottle of champagne waiting. It did not last long.

The day after

Fifty days or so of cycling does something to a body that isn't easily switched off. By the end, our legs had come to expect the exercise as their due — walking, of all things, had started to feel like the tiring option. So when it came to collecting a rental car, our legs, if not entirely our sense of occasion, were glad of the excuse for one more day in the saddle: a further run south along the coast to pick it up, rather than simply stopping.

It was windy — properly windy, the sort that pushes a walking pace into a run whether you ask it to or not. For once, luck was entirely on our side: the wind was blowing south, the same direction we were going, down State Road A1A, the coast road that runs from St Augustine most of the way to Daytona Beach. We didn't so much ride it as get carried along it, fifteen to twenty miles an hour without working for any of it, the Atlantic on one side the whole way. After fifty days of earning every mile the hard way — climbs, headwinds, heat, a tunnel we wrote letters about — the trip's very last day was the one time the road did the work for us. A seriously good ending to the trip.

Stations on this ride

• Phoenix — the state in miniature, air-conditioned indoors and cooking outdoors
• Marfa — an artist's town in the desert, with lights nobody has explained
• San Antonio — an unplanned extra day, earned by a broken gear mechanism
• The Alamo — smaller than its reputation, and better for it
• Tallahassee — six windy days in, a rest with friends
• St Augustine — the finish, champagne, and a long search for the sea