Day 15: Rough River Dam, KY - Tara

Another short day! We were only going 60 miles today, another ‘rest’ day, ha. Because I was sleeping inside in the air conditioning, I didn’t wake up until 7:15. So late that I almost missed some of Bret’s pancakes. Almost. I still managed to eat three. After reluctantly boiling water on my campstove to have coffee, we packed our stuff and headed out for breakfast #2 at Subway. The girls and I somehow managed to stay at Subway for a whopping 2 and a half hours. That’s our record so far for most dilly-dallying in one place. Why ride early when you can sit in Subway for two meals and ride out just in time to catch the heat of the day?

Actually today was a beautiful day. It never got too hot and there was a nice breeze that wasn’t strong enough to be classified as a headwind. There were pretty white, pink and purple flowers in all of the fields. Horses were galloping and thankfully the road offered only gentle up and down hills. We saw some Amish! I didn’t know that they existed as far south as Kentucky. Perhaps they are some offshoot of Amish that is called something else, I’m not sure. We saw several but I only got this crappy picture from the back because I heard they don’t like their photo being taken and I didn’t want to be rude. This dude flew past us in his horse and buggy. One of the girls commented about how they are crazy to still be using horses as a mode of transportation in 2010. Then we realized that we are riding bikes to California and that perhaps we are the crazy ones.

Team “girls” continued to spend the day taking food breaks at every possible moment, much to the annoyance of our route leaders who had to wait forever at a rest stop so we could refill our water bottles. Out of the blue we had to climb a 17%+ grade hill, our steepest of the entire route so far. It’s about as steep as people like us can ride up without falling over or going backwards. It was nuts. I really want to be able to ride up this hill when I get to San Francisco. I’m starting to wonder if that’s feasible.

We stopped for a final time for blackberry cobbler and ice cream before crossing the actual Rough River Dam into camp. I’m almost positive I’ve seen this dam on the History Channel before. How thrilling. The campsite is nice and has showers in close proximity. I’m currently a mile up the road at the Lodge which has comfy chairs, free wifi, and what I’m told is an awesome breakfast buffet for $7. I sort of skipped dinner to blog and watch TV so I’m very excited about that. I guess I’ll ride back to camp in the dark and eat a sleeve of Pop-Tarts in my tent, which is my new ‘sort of sad’ thing to do.

Cool things:

We crossed time zones today into Central Time! I really feel like I’m GOING somewhere now. The girls and I were thrilled to find out that even though we didn’t get on the road until 11am, we would roll into camp an hour early. Or that’s what we told ourselves.

We have apparently done just about 1,000 miles on our trip so far. That means my bike seat has about 2,000 miles on it since I bought it in March and it still sucks. Nice!

There’s a new video online! It makes us look pretty hardcore if you ask me. You can see me summiting Hayder’s Gap in the white bike shorts. Also, Bridget’s line at the top of the climb is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard and I’m so happy it’s on video to be preserved forever. Enjoy.