The End of the U.S.

Day 85, Washington D.C., Mile 3,915

After a stormy, hilly, and beautiful two weeks since leaving Knoxville, we rolled into Washington D.C., yesterday and found ourselves at the endpoint of our ride through the United States.

The fresh snow created hundreds of waterfalls in the Smokys

We left Knoxville on a hot and sunny day, pedaling our way towards the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Little did we know that the weather was going to turn on us very quickly.  At the exact moment we pulled into the campground, the heavens opened up on us with (another) amazing torrential rainstorm.  We madly set up our tent, but soon the ground was so saturated that our tent stakes would no longer hold.  Dashing out into what we would later find out were record rains, Brian laid the bicycles down and tied the tent's rainfly to them.  The storm would continue to batter us throughout the night with rain, hail, and snow.  Upon waking up exhausted, we contemplated our choices, knowing that the planned on day's ride was going to take us up and over the crest of the Appalachians and over the Newfound Gap summit at 5040 feet. 

Brian climbing the Blue Ridge Parkway

We decided to head up and over the pass, knowing that the weather would likely be pretty bad 3500 feet higher up than where we currently were.  Our plan was to cycle a hard 35 miles to the town on the other side and get a hotel.  It's o.k. to be cold and wet all day when you know you can get dry at night.  Our ride up was certainly cold, but the sun ended up coming out, snow covered the ground, and the hillsides were exploding with water from the previous nights deluge.  The hundreds of waterfalls, and torrents of rivers made quite an impression on us.  Storms are tough to ride through, but the Appalachians were in all their glory.  Our hotel room that night was warm and cozy and we took multiple showers and baths to get warm.  This series of storms had been with us since Alabama and would continue, on and off, all the way to Washington D.C.

Amy on a farm road in rural Virginia

We traveled for a couple days not on the rural country roads that we'd been sticking to these past months, but rather through the national park and on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  While these were gorgeous, and tough cycling with loaded bikes, we found that we missed the people and the little general stores, and even just seeing the houses that lined the road.  With those thoughts in mind, we dropped off the Parkway and into the college town of Boone, North Carolina, and spent a wonderful night with Beth and John Boyd, another couple that hosts traveling cyclists before heading out towards Virginia.  The park type roads are peaceful, but it was good to get back to seeing the people of America (and eating the biscuits!)

Beautiful back roads of Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley

We crossed into Virginia near Damascus, a town that is also on the Appalachian Trail, which Brian backpacked 16 years ago.  We spent the night at a hiker/biker hostel that the local church provides and talked with some Thru-Hikers that were also spending the night.  It was great for Brian to revisit a stop he made many years ago, and also for both of us to visit with people who were similar in spirit.  The dozen or so hikers we saw had all left their "regular" life for a bit of the unknown and a bit of adventure.  We were pleased to be able to swap some stories with them and reluctantly headed off on our bicycles the next morning.

Brian on the bike path through urban D.C. area.

We made our way towards Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and spent the last week of our trip climbing and descending the conglomeration of hills that lie in this beautiful and historic area of the U.S.  The greenness, the abundant thriving farms, and the hills will be what we remember of Virginia.  We'll probably also always remember sleeping in the field behind the Honda car dealership because we ran out of countryside the night before we arrived in D.C.  Our last day of our U.S. trip found us riding 40 miles, all on rails-to-trails bicycle paths, all the way into D.C. and Mike and Jeanne Kuperberg's house where we are spending a few days recuperating, getting bicycles tuned up and other odds and ends before flying to Portugal on Friday for the next leg of our journey.

At the top of a serious climb along the Blue Ridge Parkway

We'll continue to post website updates from Europe, along with our route map, but our general plan is to fly into southern Portugal, ride up to the top of that country, cross through northern Spain and into France.  We'll pedal through France and then do a tough trans-alps ride the width of Switzerland before going briefly through Italy on our way to Slovenia.  From here we're not positive of our route, but we'll probably find ourselves cycling through the countries of the former Yugoslavia before turning back North and West to go through Hungry and Poland.  We'll pedal until winter weather stops us, probably in late September, and we're hoping to find a job teaching English somewhere in Eastern Europe for the winter. We're excited and nervous for the next part of our trip.  This first leg of our journey has been so positive, the people have been so overwhelmingly nice, and the riding has been so much fun that if we stopped now, we could say "wow, what a great trip!"  But we have more of the world to see at the pace of two slowly rolling bicycle tires.

Here's some fun stat's of the trip so far:

Miles pedaled: 3,915
Days: 85
States pedaled through: 10
Money spent: $2,287
Nights under a roof: 18 (ditto showers)
Boxes of mac and cheese consumed: 21
Campgrounds: 3
Flat tires: 11 (all in the first month)
Meals shared with strangers: 19
Holes in Amy's Thermarest pad: 10 and still counting
Favorite riding state: Tennessee (Brian), Virginia (Amy)
Toughest riding state: Virginia (Brian), North Carolina (Amy)
High temperature: 88 degrees
Low temperature: 2 degrees

The Deep South: Mississippi, Alabama & Tennessee

Day 68, Knoxville Tennessee, Mile 3,175

The last two weeks found us cycling 750 miles through the deep south states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.  Northerners often group these states together as “the South,” but they were really quite different in both scenery and personality.  The only generalization I would make is that Southerners are the friendliest people on the planet.

Brian cycling the Natchez Trace in Mississippi

Mississippi: After crossing the Mississippi River, we entered the historic town of Natchez, Miss.  We had heard about this town for a long while because the community has embraced its historical heritage, both good and bad.  The town is full of fully restored antebellum (pre-Civil War) houses and the owners (dressed in period clothing) open them up to visitors during their annual Spring Pilgrimage, which we arrived during.  The Natchez Trace Parkway also begins right out of town.  This scenic parkway, run by the National Park Service was a delight.  With no commercial traffic and a 50 mph speed limit, it was a dream to cycle.  We were surrounded by trees, saw many old cotton plantations, and rode in a blissful peacefulness.  We had a memorable night in a campground along the Trace when  Bruce & Cindy Wright invited us into their RV for a full breakfast of bacon and eggs.  We left the Trace to head east and found good and bad along the way.

Amy finally stopped sobbing after the dog attack in Mississippi

Amy’s run in with a dog:  We estimate that since we left San Diego two months ago that we had been barked at by 2,500 dogs, had 500 dogs come barreling out to the edge of their property, and had 150 chase us down the street.  One finally had its way with us, as a seemingly benign lab charged into the street and bit Amy in the calf.  It’s mouth wrapped around the back of her leg, breaking the skin through her pants.  It shook Amy up pretty badly and she is still nursing her leg 10 days later.  We filed a report with the local police and called the owner and then our Warm Showers hosts in Kosciusko, Mississippi told us that Amy was the third biker this dog had bit.  When we called the owner again, he assured us that the dog was at the vet and was being put down the next day.  It was great to see an owner take responsibility, but it left Amy pretty nervous as we left town and were immediately accosted by a steady stream of dogs for the next few days.  The majority of these animals are left to roam freely in Mississippi and Alabama and it sometimes puts us on edge assessing each ones intention. 

94 year old Elmore Higgs on his farm in Alabama

Alabama: We spent five days in Alabama, and upon leaving the state we discussed our experience there.  It is a difficult state to pin down because it is full of contradictions.  We loved the rolling farmland, the mountain foothills that replaced our flat riding, and the many positive interactions with people.  We were allowed to wait out a 36 hour amazing raging thunder and lightning storm in an extra house from the Baptist church in the town of Paint Rock. We met Elmore Higgs, who at 94 was out tending his garden.  We chatted with him for about a half hour.  We talked about his tornado shelter that was built into the hillside, he told us stories of marching through Europe during his infantry service under General Patton in World War II, and then coming home to his daddy’s corn and chicken farm in Northern Alabama. And he talked about the happiest day of his life as the department of the Army flew all the surviving  WWII service members back to Washington, D.C for the unveiling of the WWII memorial.

Brian digging wild onions (ramps) on the side of the road to add to our dinner

While we had many positive experiences in Alabama, we also saw its contradictions.  After traveling through beautiful farmland, we’d turn a corner find ourselves face to face with 10 shacks or trailers all piled one on top of another.  There would be snarling dogs, cars on blocks, and strewn garbage like we’ve never before seen.  And while we had these wonderful interactions with some citizens, there were many others who looked at us with suspicion.  We’d knock on a door to ask permission to camp in a field, and they would literally not come to the door, or they may just talk to us out of a crack in the window and deny our request to camp.  Also stunning to us was when we would ask a local about how to get to a town ten miles away, they wouldn’t know.  They would respond with “well, there’s a road a half mile from here that may go there, but I’ve never been on it.”  Amy would ask how long they lived there, and they say “Oh, I was born here 40 years ago.”  I think that we just looked too foreign to many of these people that have not traveled far from their home or seen “outsiders” come past their houses before.  While we may not want to go back to the state, it was a worthwhile experience for sure.

Fried chicken and all the fixin's

Plate Lunch,
or, how to stretch $50: One of the things we’ve enjoyed most on this trip is the food, and this stretch of the South was fantastic.  Amy’s dad gave us a $50 gift card at Christmas for our trip and we used it to get as much Southern cookin’ as possible.

For southerners, plate lunch might not be anything special, but for us Yankees, it’s amazing.  For those of you who don’t know what this is, I’ll explain.  Restaurants, or more often than not, little country grocery stores,  offer a daily lunch special called “plate lunch”  (so named because a plate comes loaded to the brim with food).  It is often a meat, with a few sides of your choice, and a drink and usually costs around $6.  They won’t be advertised, but rather we just have to walk into the little corner grocery, built in 1926, head to the back and ask “do you have plate lunch?”  And they’d respond “Yup, and today it is…….”  Here’s the amount of food we were able to get with our gift from Amy’s dad:

Lunch #1: TWO plates of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, greens, sweet potatoes, cornbread, & iced tea.

Lunch #2: TWO plates of cheeseburger, fries and iced tea

Lunch #3: TWO plates of roast beef, mashed potatoes, corn bread, deviled eggs, green beans and soda.

Lunch #4: TWO plates of BBQ sandwiches, fries, coleslaw and sweet tea.

All this for 50 bucks!  And, of course, for no extra charge we get to talk with the locals who are also there filling their stomachs with this great food.  It has been the best way for us to get a feel for the culture of the area.

Lovely Tennessee farmland

Tennessee: We are now in Tennessee at Brian’s sister’s house in Knoxville, resting up before we head up through  Smoky Mountain National Park.  Despite the amazing rain, it has been our favorite state so far for cycling.  There have been some tough mountain climbs, lots of rolling green farmland, and beautiful farmhouses  along the way.  It is  neat and clean and the farms seem to be thriving.  The actual bike riding through this state is just fantastic. 



Historic Falls Mill in Belvidere, Tennessee

But our best memory of the state is our time at Falls Mill:  On a rainy day, we were cycling along when we saw a sign for “historic Falls Mill.”  We turned down the little country road and found ourselves in a little piece of paradise.  Nestled in a hollow of the Tennessee mountains is a working mill, built in 1863 and powered by an enormous 30 foot high water wheel.  We said to ourselves “we can’t just pass through here, let’s see if we can stay.”  So we asked the owners if they would consider us working in trade for us staying in their little bed and breakfast cabin (built in 1895). 

Amy filling bags with freshly stone ground white grits at Falls Mill



We weren’t sure how this would be received, but Janie Lovett immediately said “Oh yes.  Let’s get you settled in and then come on down and help us scrub the walls down for our spring cleaning.”  This afternoon of work was followed by dinner with Janie and her husband John who purchased this mill 25 years ago.  We stayed the next day and night to help them mill, box up and ship over 800 pounds of corn grits that get shipped to restaurants all over the U.S.  This was truly one of the most amazing experiences we’ve had on the trip.  Not only was the mountain setting of the mill truly a special and peaceful place, but it was inspiring to be with Janie and John who are living their dream life, and making a living at it, despite what all the responsible type people would argue is practical.  It was also inspiring because we were not just looking at a museum mill, but one that is still a viable commercial enterprise, and it is all powered by the waterwheel that is over 100 years old!  You can go to their web site at http://www.fallsmill.com/. Click on the picture of John to see a video description of how the mill works.  Listen closely because the mill is operating as he explains it.