Written by Amy Lyon
The intention of Lyon Family Cycles Vietnam is to have a place to collectively archive our trip before, during and after and to share it with whoever is interested in monitoring our progress and adding thoughts of their own.
The idea to create a blog was born on a 50 mile training ride Saturday, May 19, my first long ride and Jonathan's second. We leave for Bangkok two months from today.
We rode the near circumference of Lake Waccamaw twice, a 24 mile pendulum swing. The additional three miles of Jonathan's beloved lake are impassible by bike although one could wade through it carrying their bike above their head. Luckily for me Jonathan never seriously suggested it although he did ask me if I thought I'd like to hike it at the end of the day. It was sufficient for me to find an extra two miles to make an even 50 which we did by biking up to the convenience store for a bottle of Propel. Perhaps the wading would have been a more useful training tactic.
We were hoping for hot and humid weather, to begin to get us in shape, but instead were given a perfect combination of 70 degrees, clear, a slight wind and no humidity. We spent much of our time counting alligator sitings (7 or 8) checking out the homes for sale and watching the turtles sun themselves on the banks and on partially submerged tree limbs in the canal that rings the lake, dug out at the end of World War 2. By the way, there are as many turtles as Lyon relatives - which means they are hard to count and even harder to corral.
We're apt to clock most of our miles at Lake Waccamaw. Soon it'll become steamy summer in the south to better condition us for the Vietnamese rainy season. And then there is Dales, the best fried shrimp, hushpuppies and sweet tea around. But most of all, there is John MacNeil, and his famous log cabin lakeside home with a 100 foot dock draped with cypress trees and hundreds of flowers and John himself, who bought the land in 1947 and has lived there ever since.
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