My last day of climbing really tried to make an impression on me. Check out the grade of the hill in the distance.
I'd like to say that was the only hill like that, but I think we all know that's crap. Luckily, it was only about 90 degrees today. I took a shortcut that shaved about 10 miles off of my day, but left me on a 40-mile stretch of road without services. After a while, I began to look for a nice house to stop at and ask to fill my water bottles. I have a system for selecting the houses most likely to help me. I've refined the system a lot since those early days when I just looked for cars with all their windows in tact. I looked for places: with well-trimmed lawns, no abandoned cars, and no dogs. I try to avoid houses with a lot of farm animals or trucks with "Loco Motion" stickers.
A nice young woman filled my bottles with iced water, and so I rolled on. It started to rain for a few hours, which is kinda miserable. Try doing anything for three hours in soaking wet pants, then try doing it on a bike. It's unpleasant. Consider yourselves fortunate that those pictures were out of focus.
So anyway, the rain stopped after a while, and the residual heat boiled the rain into a thick fog that clung to the mountains. It was kinda cool looking. I would have thought it was cooler if the fog clung to flat land istead of mountains, but that's another story. Here's a picture, though it's a bit distant.
As I approached Berea, the skies opened again, and I heard residents saying that there is a severe thunderstorm watch, so I retreated to this hotel, and you guys get to read about my adventures. Okay, my travels. Okay, my neverending monotony of hills and bigger hills.
Stay tuned for more updates. Sorry if the updates are a bit sporadic; if you need more frequent stories about this kind of stuff, GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND DO IT YOURSELF. Everybody understand? Great.