July 17th, 2006
The next day was memorable because Chelsea took a tumble only about 30 miles into our ride. We had been climbing, climbing, climbing again, and she looked down to shift, but she was too close to me, and her tire clipped mine. She went down immediately, and I must give her major compliments about how gracefully she fell! She also had the good luck to fall onto a grassy shoulder. She got some nasty road rash, with a big gouge out of her waist, and a twisted ankle. We still went another 6 miles, because we had no signal and couldn’t reach Alex. We were able to ride directly to the campground – Hillman Ferry, in Land Between The Lakes Recreation Area in Kentucky.
I had taken a tumble the first day in Tennessee on the second steep hill we climbed. I went to change gears, my chain slipped, and I couldn’t unclip from my pedal fast enough, so down I went. My bruises are finally almost gone, but I still have lumps on my ankle and my knee. Ah, the joys of adventuring…
The Hillman Ferry campground was a serious enterprise – it was one of the busiest we’ve seen yet – quite a little business they’ve got going there! It felt heavenly to take hot showers, and we were able to get Chelsea’s “wounds” cleaned up from the tumble. We got to do laundry in beautiful machines, and the bathrooms were nice and very clean. It’s amazing how little things like that are so heavenly! A side note – the woman who took our registration was the first non-southern accent we have heard since South Florida!
We took a “field trip” out to the post office at Grand Rivers, where we picked up our first packages on the whole trip. After hanging around for a bit, we headed out to McDonalds just to get air conditioning, and to get Internet access. We stayed at least 4 hours tucked away in a corner, running our laptop cord over the edge near the main counter so we could have electricity. This is definitely not Starbucks territory! We were able to get our business taken care of, but the Internet access was so slow that it wasn’t worth much. If we’d had decent speeds, we could have gotten things done so much faster, and could have gotten a lot more done. Ah, the joys of being off the beaten path…
We did find a Wal-Mart again, and stocked up on water and campground food. The water is only 64 cents at Wal-Mart compared to $3 a gallon at other places. When we go through 4-5 gallons a day, hmmmm…let’s do the math on that one….
Grand Rivers is a great little town – very touristy but in a nice way. There’s evidence of a lot of activity there real estate wise – so we will follow up on that. We needed dinner that night – we had spent until very late doing the errands, and even though one restaurant in Grand Rivers – our last hope in town – was closed, they let us in to eat and didn’t pressure us at all to hurry. This is definitely one of the advantages of life off the beaten path!
Again, we noticed a difference in the people in Kentucky compared to Tennessee and Mississippi. There is even a noticeable physical difference.