SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY

It's a well known saying for a very good reason. The past two nights, when the sun started to get a little too low for comfort, I've stopped at completely random houses to ask if I might be able to camp on their front lawns for the evening. Naturally I expected to get some odd looks and a rejection or two at first, but being quite used to both gawking and denial I asked away making sure I had my best friendly-Canadian face on. Here is what happened.

The night before last I was just south of Greenville, Alabama when I decided I should call it quits for the day. I rode down the road sizing up the various trailers, houses, and cabins, trying to decide which door to knock on. I passed a house with a elderly looking gentleman cutting his grass atop a riding lawn mower. "He looks like a grandfather," I though to myself as I doubled back towards their driveway.
While pushing my bike across the gravel, taking off my sunglasses and trying to look as harmless as I possibly could, a woman who I assumed to be his wife came out the front door and sort of intercepted me. I greeted her and asked if she would mind if I camped on their front yard for the evening.
"Oh of course," she said, "just set up where ever you like." And she waved me off to whatever part of the yard I liked.
Stunned at how instantaneous her acceptance was I wheeled my bike over beside a large oak tree well away from the house and started to unload my stuff. In the midst of my unpacking I the sound of the mower grew louder. I figured that she had mentioned me to her husband and he was coming to kick me off his property or more simply just run me over. I turned around as he pulled up behind me and cut the engine. But he wanted nothing more than to size me up and soon we were talking about my ride and how bad the roads were and how people drove too fast. His name was Lomax (awesome) and his wife's name was Deborah and they were semi-retired living out here outside of Greeville, he a brick mason and she a teacher. Eventually he went back to cutting the lawn and I resumed setting up camp. After I had the tent set up I sat down to eat some dinner. As I started to eat handfuls of the same damn trail mix I'd been eating for the past 4 days Lomax came out of the house and walked over to where I was sitting.
"I hope you eat chicken," he said as he handed me a styrofoam tray of chicken, scallop potatoes, coleslaw, BBQ sauce, a pudding cup for dessert, and a cup of ice tea to wash it all down.

He told me that when I was finished eating I was welcome to come on inside and grab a shower if I wanted to get cleaned up. I almost started crying as I did my best to express what this sort of kindness and generosity meant to a weary traveler such as myself. He assured me that it was nothing but leftovers from a gathering they had had at their place the weekend before. Leftovers never tasted so good. After I'd gone inside to shower up I again tried to thank them enough. I made sure I got their address as well so that when I get home I can send them a big can of Canadian Maple Syrup. Beautiful people.


Last night I was biking through Canoe, Alabama as the sun started to dip low. I picked a house with a basketball net hoping that I would remind the resident of one of their children, parental instincts kicking in, and agree to let me sleep in their yard. The door that I knocked on was open by a forty-something year old woman and upon my request she reacted much the same way that Deborah did the night before. Shocked again by my uncanny ability to pick houses inhabited my saints, I headed over to the side yard to get ready for nightfall. Again, sitting in my camp chair eating that stupid trail mix, I was approached by the man of the house. "Well, my luck had to run out eventually," I thought.
But, he shook my hand and introduced himself as Chris and we proceeded to have a very very long conversation about everything from post secondary education, to the new medical reforms in the US, to hurricanes, to his kids, to insurance of both the medical and proprietary varieties. We must have been chatting for well over an hour and it was almost dark before he said that he should head inside to see what was going on but that he would "holler at me in a bit." I sat down again to choke back some boring camp food. Not 5 minutes later he emerged from the house with a massive plate of homemade lasagna, garlic bread, beautiful cookies made by his wife, and some more ice tea. He even brought out a phone in case I wanted to make any calls.

I was overwhelmed, quite literally in shock, and probably sounded like a bit of a stuttering idiot as I again tried to illustrate my mountainous amounts of gratitude. He waved it off and told me there was a shower inside I could use if I wanted to. When I was about halfway through my delicious plate of food Chris came back outside to introduce his youngest son to me and tell me that he was off to help with the prom decorations over at the local school. And so I ate and read and took a makeshift shower in their backyard with a garden hose and one of my t-shirts and a couple hours later Chris returned to ask if I wanted to come see what was going on over at the school. I hastily accepted and hopped into his massive toy-truck of a vehicle. As we headed over he explained that this was a private school that he himself had graduated from when he was a teenager. The auditorium was part of a beautiful old schoolhouse and once inside I was very impressed by the effort and design that had gone into the decoration of the room. After meeting some of the local kids helping to decorate Chris showed me some of the athletic facilities they had. A massive, gorgeous gym dedicated to basketball, a recently re-sodded football field with an equally recently renovated change room (complete with an impressively large school mascot tiled masterfully into the floor), a fully functioning track, and a baseball diamond fitted with a brand new lighting system. I was very envious of the gym in particular. The floor looked newer and nicer than anything I'd been on in my six or so years of playing basketball. We headed back to the house where I met his two eldest sons who had just returned from a Brazilian Jujitsu mixed-martial-arts training night. His eldest son's bicep was the size of my thigh. They asked my some questions about Canada that I did my best to answer and then I went back out to my tent. In the morning I woke up to the sound of cars leaving and crawled out of my tent to what I thought was an empty house. I got my stuff together and as I was leaving Chris came outside to wish me farewell. He shook my hand and handed me a big ziplock bag of his wife's exquisite cookies. Beautiful, beautiful, people.