Our departure took us south of town for 5 miles before turning toward the river to intersect Highway 1 South to Greenville.  Our early morning route was dominated with mature cotton, rice, and some corn fields...but mostly cotton.  We haven't seen much of the cotton pickin' process yet, but I'm sure we're going to see lots more before we get out of Mississippi.  I spent a few minutes early this morning snapping pictures of a crop duster spreading defoliant on the cotton fields so harvest must be close at hand.  He seemed to be amused that I was filming his work...several times he would intentionally fly in my direction to give me a good look as he banked for a picture.  Luckily, he never was spraying while he passed me, but I'm not sure if I didn't breathe enough chemicals to do some harm...I'll see if my arms fall off tonight (or anything else for that matter, stay tuned).

Although there wasn't much activity at the gins yet, I told the riders to try to get a tour of a gin if they had time to stop...I toured one last year.  It definitely looked like a dirty process, but it was interesting to see Docker pants in their early stages and how they cycled the raw cotton through the gin.  According to my tour guide, the big bales that sit by the fields are called modules.  Each module weighs approximately 8500 pounds...it takes 17 bales to make a module and cotton sells for about $.60/lb...that makes each module worth approximately $5100.  Trucks haul the modules from the fields to the gin where it is stored until it is processed.  The process starts when the module is fed into the gin where it is broken up by machine, dried, and run through several machines that separate the seeds from the raw cotton.  After it has been "deseeded," it is packed into a tight container in 500 pound lots to go to market.  All the "trash" that is left over after the gin process is used for compost and spread back on the fields.  We also got to see the making of modules up close and personal.  I got some good pictures of the field laborers picking and transporting the cotton to the packer machine.  They unload the cotton into the packer where it is pounded into a hard module where it is stored in the field until the transport truck comes to take it to the gin.  The transport truck backs up against the module, tilts the bed of the truck, and augers the module into the bed of the truck...quite interesting to see.  It unloads the module at the gin the same way only backwards...the module augers out to the ground from the tilted truck bed.  I'll include photos tomorrow if I have room to show the process in more detail.

As I've said before, today's terrain was so flat, if we could have gotten on top of our motel in Clarksdale, we could have seen our motel in Greenville 80 miles away.  I even heard someone say they wished we had a hill or two...now that's the spirit!  The flat terrain did  help us get down the road as the pace lines were flying this morning so fast we could barely keep up with the support.  About 10 riders beat the SAG van to the second SAG but I covered it in White until Green came to my rescue.  I think the flatlanders are really loving this...Steven was beaming as he was dangling off the front on his "Killer B" Bacchetta just ahead of Julius and Jack who were trying to sneak up on him.  Marilyn and Nancy were both excited today too as their averages were a couple MPH higher than usual because they tucked in on a pace line early in the day.  Say what you want about boring flat roads...they rock when you want to ROCK.  

Tomorrow we get up early to ride 100 miles to Vicksburg...another sunny day on flat terrain.  Hopefully, we will have enough time to tour the battlefield, but it will be tight.  We have another flat day, but depending on the winds, it could be another tiring day anyway...anytime we get a day with 3 digits, it's going to be hard no matter what the winds are doing.  We are watching Ivan in the gulf and are hoping it turns as predicted toward the east.  We surely don't wish it on the state of Florida again, but we definitely don't need it on our route.  Even if it does go east, we may see some affects of the storm, but whatever comes, we'll deal with it somehow.  Since everyone got in early today, we should be well rested for our challenges tomorrow...see you then.