I was on a loaded bicycle tour from southeast coastal Florida to San Diego, California. I did complete that tour ok, but it was what happened along the way that was more like calamitous. One example of it happened maybe 30 times before I began to notice it. After I became aware of it I watched for it, and sure enough it was for real. Every time I crossed onto any kind of bridge, motor vehicles would appear and cross that first expansion crack at the exact same instant I did. This happened at every bridge across the continent. Even on back roads on Sundays where you might see only one or two vehicles every thirty minutes, they appeared and came three abreast with me at every bridge. However, what was more disturbing than knowing it was planned, timed and coordinated were the loud, ear splitting, penetrating noises they made hitting those cracks. It was extremely unusual. I had bicycled through China. I had bicycled through some of the most densely populated areas in the world, but I had never heard anything even remotely like it.
There was another matter of woe, if you want to call it that. I used the side lanes right of the white line always when they were there. Intermittently there would be an obstruction in the side lane that could not be ridden over. It might be a two by four with nails in it. A piece of ply wood with nails sticking up. A muffler. The branch of a tree. Whatever. There were many and varied. It was always every time in a place where I could not cycle past it on the right. That meant I had to turn left to get on the main motorized part of the road, go past the obstruction, and get back into the side lane. That is a simple easy solution, unless vehicles suddenly show up at the same exact instant you start to pass the thing in the path. They came three abreast with me at every obstacle I came to, every one all the way across the continent, every one, even on the most sparsely traveled back roads. Obviously timed and coordinated.
It was the same trip. I was cycling west on Hwy 78 in California near the town of Glamis. Two unusual looking tractor trailer trucks came along, one going east and the other going west. They came exactly three abreast with me on a narrow, two-lane road with no side lane. A while later came the same two trucks and the same three abreast with them. That happened maybe five or six times.
One thing about these vehicles. All had license plates that were somehow obscured. The most obvious example was a tag that had a piece of black something fastened over it. The others were difficult to read because they had been fixed to be that way.
