Blog

  • Golaconda IL, Rauchfauss Campground

    July 18th, 2006

    We started out with good attitudes on Tuesday the 18th, but it became clear very quickly that Chelsea’s derailleur was not working properly. After struggling up one particularly steep hill, we realized we needed a bike shop, and going back to Grand Rivers was our best bet. Alex picked us up and we went back to the bike shop we had seen the day before. What a wonderful experience it was! Turns out that both Chelsea and I needed new chains and new derailleur cables, and one of Chelsea’s shifters was broken. We left our bikes for a few hours to be fixed, and went to get lunch and send off some packages full of things we don’t need on the trip. It has been seriously great to have the extra space from sending back those items!

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  • Hillman Ferry near Grand Rivers KY

    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.

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  • Gatlin Campground in Land Between The Lakes KY

    July 16th, 2006

    The next night found us in Gatlin Campground in the Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area in Kentucky. We had expected the ride to smooth out a lot, after the nasty hills of TN, but we found the riding to be just as hard and harder in some ways. We quit after only about 40 miles, as we were really tired and again, the heat was getting to us seriously, after a tough morning of hills. The campground had only one water spigot, and chemical toilets, so it was another night without showers. Again, there was only one other campsite occupied, so we had great privacy, and we had a waterfront spot.

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  • Danville Grill; Kentucky Lake TN

    July 15th, 2006

    The next day we tackled some really, really serious hills in Tennessee, headed towards Kentucky. We ended the day at Kentucky Lake, and couldn’t find a campground anywhere within reasonable distance. On a hunch, we stopped at a small convenience store and grill at the end of a road, near a boat launch, where I asked about camping. It turns out that it is so relaxed there, that people just pop up a tent by the side of the road. They offered the use of their outdoor bathrooms, and the bathrooms even had a shower. We were able to set up our tent just off the road in a shady, amazingly private area, and walk to the store.

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  • Loretta Lynn Campground near Waverly TN

    July 14th, 2006

    The day after I last wrote, we did make it to the Loretta Lynn campground, near Waverly TN, and it was just what you might expect from the name. It had a great swimming pool, where we played around for a while, gratefully (yes, it was still in the high nineties with a heat index hovering around 105), and it had a washer and dryer so we could do our clothes, and showers with hot water. What a treat! The whole camp had a very country/cowboy flavor, with a separate horse camping area, gift shops, tours of her house, a museum, an old mining tour, club house, basketball, a creek that we could wade in, paddleboats, and soda fountain – where we killed time out of the heat by ever so slowly drinking a root beer float and looking at all the food and supplies. The heat was really overwhelming, but we did enjoy the campground (other than the rather large number of flies and mosquitoes, and then huge bugs in the washrooms). We got a spot right next to the creek.

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  • Centerville, TN – 1,356 miles

    July 13, 2006

    We have finally finished the Natchez Trace Parkway, and tomorrow we start the serious roller-coaster hills of Tennessee. Chelsea and I have made good time the last week on our riding days (we took 2 days to catch up on our organizational issues). We have ridden 65-72 days almost every day except today, when we did only 38 miles. But wow, they were some miles! We were extremely tired when we woke up, and it was very hard to get going, and then we hit our steepest hills yet. We had several hills today that were 1-2 miles long, and we had to put it in a low gear and just keep going. We have gotten a lot stronger, and the long slow hills are quite do-able now, but it’s a killer to have steep hills and steep downhills one after the other. That’s what we will be facing the next 4-5 days as we cross the Ozarks. We’ve apparently been in the foothills of the Appalachians the last few days.

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  • Mile Post 193 on the Natchez Trace Parkway

    July 7th, 2006

    We are writing this tonight from a National Park Service campground at Mile Post 193 on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. We rode 66 miles today, and it was just gorgeous the entire way. The horrendous humidity and rain that has been plaguing us the last week or so finally lifted with a strong breeze last night, actually more like a wind. It finally dried off our tent, and took away the humidity and the clouds, leaving the air much cooler as well. What a relief!

    The only bad news was that the wind became headwinds for us the entire day, which slowed our progress a lot. We felt up to having our first 80-100 mile day, and feel convinced that we could have if we hadn’t had the headwinds. The wind has died down tonight, so we are aiming to do significant mileage tomorrow.

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  • Jackson MS; 1046 miles and still rolling…

    July 6th, 2006

    Sorry for our long silence, but the rigors of our trip have been catching up to us the last two weeks. I remain astonished at how much time it takes just to keep on top of our daily tasks. We get up between 5:30 and 6 a.m., and it usually takes us about 45 minutes to an hour to get ready to go, by the time we get down to the washroom, get dressed, slather on sunscreen, and eat something. Most mornings we are pretty tired, so we are moving fairly slowly. We have to pack up our belongings from the tent from the night before and make sure everything is in the car so that Stacey and Alex can pack more easily.

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  • Vancleave MS; 49 miles – 663 miles and still rolling…

    June 23rd, 2006

    Each day continues to be a big adventure. Today we left Bayou La Batre, AL, at 6:45 a.m. and headed out right into headwinds for the first 36 miles. It’s certainly a strength building opportunity! The heat was a major factor today, too – for most of the last two hours or more it felt like riding right into a blast furnace. The terrain was fine – but we had pretty busy traffic all the way past Wade MS.

    We were then routed into a back road that goes through the Pascagoula River Wildlife Management Area. It was too hot and too late in the day (though it was only 11 a.m.) to see much in the way of wildlife, but we really enjoyed the route and the lower traffic. We had one wild experience in that section – we could see a road department mower up ahead of us – the kind that just chews up and spits out anything in its path. The cloud of dust it was blowing up was really amazing, and it was billowing out right into the road. We knew we had to pass, so we speeded up a bit and swung wide to go ahead. Even though we have wide-coverage sunglasses, we still had to squint our eyes nearly shut, and had to close our mouths almost flat shut because of the bits of debris – it was like going through a debris hailstorm.

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  • Bayou La Batre AL

    June 22nd, 2006

    We have spent the entire day catching up on our blogs and getting the picture gallery sorted out. We still have a ways to go on that, as we have several hundred+ pictures to sort through, from two different cameras. We need to choose the best ones, give them captions, and organize them by date. It’s a big job! We then need to upload all our photos to the Google Picasa web gallery (we got accepted into their beta test which just started a few days ago). Evelyn can grab them from there and put them on our website. Bear with us while we catch up to ourselves on this one. I have referred in several places to the gallery of photos, but we haven’t gotten there quite yet. Give us a day or so, still.

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