Not quite in order of the day, starting with last first, but have to start here. Where? The Virginia state line, the last state, a touch over 210 miles to go in the next two days. Shouldn't we just jam it all in one day? Worth thinking about anyway... We also saw a sign for "Chesapeake Bay Watershed Area" and crossed the south fork of the Potomac River today. Everything points to getting so very, very close. You probably think that's obvious, I mean what does 28 days on the road get you if not close to the Atlantic? But seems like a dream if that makes any sense at all. I mean, we're on BICYCLES for goodness sakes, you can't take a bicycle that far from home no matter what the map on the side of the silver trailer says and the state line signs say and everything else points to. Can you? Seems so silly right now, but that's the way it feels. So somewhat back to chronological order, our first epic day of the trip, in fact first epic day of the year for both of us. We may have over 30 century rides each in 2010, but not a single day over 10,000ft of vertical until today. So call it 105 miles and 10,600 vertical feet in something like 15.6 average or just over 8 hours total time. Not bad for day 28. Actually the climbing felt great, we're both very comfortable on less than 10% grades which was what the whole day was like.
Almost forgot, two comments on West Virginia to close that state out. The last two nights we went to "family restaurants" which are restaurants that don't sell any alcohol. Hello, how does any parent deal with children without alcohol providing assistance, that just makes no sense. You can buy beer\wine at every gas station or grocery store but not in a family restaurant (don't think McDonalds, think the Moutaineer Steakhouse). Also the trees. It's all been cut at some point of course, but how neat to see so many 60 ft Maples and other hardwoods in the forests, I don't remember that from growing up on the east coast, they seemed bigger and straighter than what I recall.
Then today. We started at 7:00am, again in the cool fog that was so thick that sunglasses were too dark to wear, climbing immediately out of the motel (oh do I hate climbing first thing in the morning!). We went up, we went down and repeated the excercise about 6 times today. First a sequence of 5, then 1 big climb, 1 small climb, and finally 1 big climb over the Shenendoah range and into Harrisonburg.
Here's the visual starting out, fog and mountains and trees.
The roads were quiet at that point which was good because the shoulder was terrible, we had to ride on the road, in fact Brian went down (but continued the day) when his wheel got stuck between the shoulder and the roadway. Five "mountains" were Mt El (2,550ft), Shaver's Mt (3,760ft), Middle Mt (3,180ft), Rich Mt (3,350), and lastly Allegheny Mt (3,290ft) each with a long descent between them and all along Rt 33.Then we broke out in the sun and into a long valley where we did a valley traverse on a narrow asphalt road, lots of loose gravel, felt more like a goat path than a legal road. At the end of the valley we went up again, not sure of the mountain name, but there was an overlook of the German Valley where Tom is posing, below. We pounded very hard up the 4 mile hill to the overlook, Tom passing me 4 times and me passing him 5, which led to some muttering about my Inprudent Attacking, my Unappreciated Immaturity, etc, etc. But funny how he kept keeping up with me in the midst of my unappreciated behavior. It was just fun to be on a hill.
Then a big downhill, long and fun, a bump up and then into lunch. After lunch was the long climb over the Shenendoah Pass (range?), not sure, it was where the Virginia state line was, and then a 20 mile roll out and down to the town and our hotel. Since it is Wes's last night we had dinner with he and his wife\3 year old daughter, he is off to ride in a club event tomorrow so we won't be seeing him (or his circus pants) again. Sore legs from the climbing, but a great day, did we have to wait 28 days for this? Roadkill included a deer, a fox, 6 raccoons and 3 skunks. Almost included a doberman that chased Tom for over a mile and was in the wrong lane for oncoming traffic, but it got lucky when the truck slammed on its brakes.
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