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