Again, the Dutch were gone by the time I woke up, but I knew that I would see them again -- I mean, where the hell are they gonna go? They can't hide -- they're Dutch and this is Kentucky.
Knowing that I had a hard day ahead of me, I tried to break camp quickly. By "quickly," I mean that I didn't stop to catch my breath while disassembling the tent, no matter how hard I was sweating. I'm a brave soldier, you know.
Here's a little parting shot I took of one of my many tentmates at the park. She had a bit of junk in her trunk, but was otherwise a nice visitor. The dangling dead thing is a caterpillar that dropped onto my tent. Score one for the good guys.
One of the few perks of climbing into a campground is that you get to coast out in the morning. I enjoyed a steep downhill for the first few miles, leading straight to the state line. The actual line was less than impressive, but hey, maybe the next nine states will have groovy signs, right? RIGHT?
So the day turned out to be pretty ghastly, and I started missing the people of Virginia about 30 seconds after crossing the border. People routinely yelled at me from their cars, saying clever things like "Get a Car" and "Heeeeyyy!" Then they would laugh and drive off and sleep with their Daddy's sister or something. I would later learn that this was really an Appalachian trait -- once out of 'tham thar hills,' the people got progressively nicer. But in Appalachia (or, as I fondly nicknamed it, Crappalachia,) the people took a real interest in my journey. Many, many of the people who yelled drove old cars with windows missing -- though they were impressively repaired with duct tape and trash bags.
One nice thing about Kentucky is that they aren't afraid to blast the hell out of a mountain if they want to build a road through it. Virginia could learn a lesson here. All that unspoiled beauty just makes climbing hills harder. Unfortunately, the roads themselves are definately not as nice as Virginia. Note the crumbling white line that I had to ride on.
The route quickly took me onto a very rural road, and Wow, was it an experience. Trash literally lined the roadway, and I do mean lined. I'm using the word lined here -- about trash. There were literally 10 bottles every 5 feet or so. I can't believe that I didn't take a picture, because you just wouldn't believe it. Trash everywhere, from bottles to cups to bags to car parts and more. In retrospect, it's a foreseeable problem -- if you use all your trashbags to line your car windows, you're gonna end up with extra trash.
Another thing I noticed is that a lot of people on the back roads raise roosters. No hens, though. It's almost like there is an illegal sport or something, and that they raise the roosters to -- I don't know -- fight, or something. Of course, unleashed dogs continue to make life exciting.
The route got progressively steeper as I continued, culminating in CR 611, a bad mammajamma of a road. I dismounted and pushed, and I'm okay with that. A few passing four-wheelers got a kick out of it as well. A lot -- and I mean a lot (I'm not just saying this because the people were rude) -- a whole lot of the people on four-wheelers were unbalanced couples. A very skinny man and a very not-skinny girl, more often than not. A guy I know refers to this phenomenon as "Jack Sprat Syndrome," and I think I've discovered the motherland.
The rest of the day went a lot like the morning. Up, down, up, down. I passed a hostel and decided to ride an extra ten miles to stay at a hotel, as a sort of belated birthday present. The first hotel was closed, and the second -- say it with me -- was at the top of a hill. About 3 miles of uphill climbing, to be exact (I knew it would be at least 3 miles when the proprietor told me it was a mile and a half away.) I ran into the Dutch near the motel -- they had also decided to stay indoors. They warned me about the motel, but I must admit that it still came as a surprise. A persistent mildew smell emanated from every piece of furniture and a window-unit air conditioner rattled out a mournful tune. The shower had more culture than I had seen all day in Kentucky, and a mousehole near my bed made every noise during the night a cause for excitement. Can I live it up or what? Happy Birthday to me!
I briefly considered killing the motel owner and stashing his body in the ice machine, a la Psycho 4. But the clever bastard had foreseen this possibility and foiled my plans by not having an ice machine.