TRANSAMERICA BICYCLE 2015: May 2015

Day 21: Sonora, KY to Falls of Rough, KY (41.6 miles)

Day 22: Falls of Rough, KY to Utica, KY (48.8 miles)
Day 23: Utica, KY to Sebree KY (28.1 - or as Dana says: 'an active rest day')

Ear Worms:
Sarah Fulford: Hey There Uncle Sam
Pat Benetar: Heartbreaker

Riding the roads of Western Kentucky...

Most amazing sunset over Falls of Rough lake... magical way to end a day of cycling

Moments and milestones. That is what these past three days have been about. On day 21 we passed into Central Time Zone. On day 22 my odometer hit 1000 miles. Coming up here we'll be crossing into Illinois. I can't even begin to believe it, but I'm almost a fourth of the way through this trip. I got an e-mail from my uncle asking how I could be so relaxed about it all, and I guess I'm maybe only just now starting to comprehend what I'm doing. Because I think to actually do it, you can't really understand it. You have to just start in and go or else you probably would never start! For a few moments these past few days I even felt absolutely one with my bike. These birds would fly next to me and we would be going the exact same speed. So there we were together, the birds and I, rolling along, flying through the wind. It was pretty amazing and beautiful.

crossed into Central Time!!

Right now I'm sitting here with Dana and McKaylie (Mud and Glamour n' Guts), Janice and Catherine, and two new rider Jim (from Poulsbo, WA) and Andre (from Germany) here at the Sebree Baptist Church bike hostel.

We've been riding Western Kentucky, which besides having the most respectful drivers (points to Western Kentucky!!), they have lawns. And I mean LAWNS. And lawn mowing. And lawn decorations. I mean seriously, there have been some pretty amazing decorations. I think one person started it and everyone along the highway followed suite.

These past few days have been great biking with Ed, but now he has ridden on past as the rest of us took a short riding day. But I so enjoyed getting to know him and share the experience with him - like all the gas station stops and rest stops and restaurants, incredible camping at the Falls of Rough lake, or speaking of falls.....Yep, hit a BIG MILESTONE: 1000 miles biked... and subsequently came to a stop sign, got my foot stuck in my toe clips, and just flopped right over on the pavement. Got a nice scratch on my knee but other than that, I am fine! It was pretty hilarious.... I joked that I'm just practicing up for when I get those clipless pedals. (yes, I biked through the entire Appalachians in tennis shoes, apparently losing 30% of my power every time I turned the pedal, so I'm ordering bike shoes that should be in Carbondale for me)

Ed and I in front of Charlie's guesthouse

Also met up with Janice and Catherine! (58 and 67 years old respectively!!) I've been reading their entries in guestbooks since the very first day of this trip, so it's great to meet them. We've stayed the last three nights at the same place, so we've become another little bike brigade again. Janice has been planning this trip for several years and then Catherine heard about it through a friend and called her up asking if she could come along!

MOMENT:
Sitting here at Ed and I's campsite watching the sun go down over the lake at Falls of Rough. It's casting a beautiful glow over the bikes and tents, the crickets are coming out, the warmth of the sun on my face. There's this incredible post storm brilliance. A perfect evening after a big time storm that we managed to miss by pulling under a ballpark picnic area spot. We were coming through McDaniels and saw on the horizon this huge billowing cloud with lightening bolts and both of us were just like "no way." So we pulled out, checked the radar which looked pretty bad and I told McKaylie about it so just a few minutes later they pull into the covering too! So we all four hunkered down for quite the rainstorm. It was pretty fun actually - because we weren't in it of course! And we were all there experiencing it.

yep, there's a storm a comin'

it got wet.

MOMENT AT THE UTICA FIRESTATION: Just got called out to the field where the fireflies were just putting on this incredible light show. Like being in a huge stadium at night with camera flashes. Expect even more powerful in that we were standing outside the Utica Fire department in a field watching this with the crickets and bullfrogs and an occasional dog barking in the distance. It was just like 'wow - here we are in Western Kentucky, almost to Illinois, in this field full of fireflies. And we biked 1000 miles to get to this spot. Through an entire time zone!! It just put everything into perspective and I really felt how special this whole trip is. Because we bike for these moments.

Or the moment at Dooley's store just 8 miles before Utica. Ed and I stopped there and Janice and Catherine were just coming out from it. We were talking to a welder named Riley about life and how much he would like to do what we're doing. And we go into the store to be transported back in time a bit. to the old-timers having conversations about ginseng root digging and the older guy remembering doing that, finding some... about his planting potatoes that morning but his wife still has a whole list of things for him to do so 'he best be getting on.' About Riley's amazement at Catherine being 67. His eyes going wide saying she could bale hay for days no problem. That was worth everything to have that.

Dooley's store. A step back in time.

I'm thinking about all this camaraderie, this community that has formed on the road. This WORLD we have. Ed and I stopped at this convenience store and I ate a banana, throwing it in the trash. Well I guess Dana and McKaylie stopped there too and she saw the banana peel looking very fresh, saying..'oh Coty must have been here!' We are all just this big extended community doing this. Like McKaylie knowing I had been at that store because of my banana. Or us leaving the 76 chalk sign and them finding it. Or hearing about other riders chatting with that same welder from photos they posted on instagram. Or my couchsurfing hosts from Bardstown texting me to say they saw Mark ride by. We are our own social networking community. We ride with each other for awhile then go our own way but we still have our friendships and stay in touch, watching out for each other.....

Ed chalking the unmarked turn!

And they found it!!

And this thing that Janice said tonight: "If I can ride my bike across the Transamerica bicycle route then surely I can move to a new place." (She is going through transitions herself). But it's true, if I can do this, then I can do pretty much anything.

I know I won't be able to fully comprehend all of the experience until it is done, but I have this image of me, maybe on the 2nd day of the ride, stopping for lunch at this junk shop.. that was just three weeks ago! Yet it feels so long ago too. Look at all the people and magic that has happened! And yet we also just at the beginning of it all too.

And how none of us ever know what day it is. Only where we are and maybe where we are going the next day. But the day of the week? The date? None of that matters in this world that is only our own - our own little cyclist world. Where we watch fireflies dance and sleep in fire stations and churches and city parks.

THIS TRIP!!!!

Got my license plate on!

So there was this cow in the yard...and then he took a bath

Everything Montana in me says don't go up there.

Getting to know these pretty well

Riley the welder. Amazing guy.

We exploded in the Utica Fire Station

Giving Bessie Bob Barker a unibrow (found her at the picnic cover place)

oil wells a working away here

Images in Sebree, where Mud and Glamour N Guts, Janice, Catherine, Jim, and Andre stayed:

marking our hometowns on the cyclist wall map!

Can you spot my pin?

One great hostel. The way the churches have embraced the cyclists is pretty amazing

Sebree: great old drug store

Sebree: the bank! Apparently Jesse James tried to rob it!

Sebree: Oldest running barber shop in the state of Kentucky!

I was no familiar with the concept of Dairy Bars..but they are all over down here..

VEGETABLES!!!!!!!! (can you guess they're kind of hard to find?)

Day 18: Berea, KY to Harrodsburg, KY (49.6 miles)
Day 19: Harrodsburg, KY to Bardstown, KY (47.2 miles)
Day 20: Bardstown, KY to Sonora, KY (55.9 miles)

EAR WORMS:
Vince Gill: Whenever You Come Around
Patty Loveless: Nothing But The Wheel
Amy Grant: Hats (.....probably the best/worst song ever....also apparently I had a country day)
Kate Wolf: Carolina Pines (really this should have been put on the list way earlier in the ride. Pops into my head whenever I see an old abandoned house)
Nina Simone: Feeling Good

Day 20: big time headwinds today...racing to beat the storm encircling us

And so we left the mountains..... and in doing so, I find that I have been thrown by a loop, or several loops - a geographic loop, a cultural loop, an oh-yeah-there-are-things-called-headwinds loop... So much that a lot of the last three days of riding kind of blur together because I've spent a so much of it being thrown off by this change as well as working on physically recovering from the push I did at the end of the Appalachians.

But you wouldn't believe the change that happened just like that. Did I just land on mars? That's how different it is. DOGS DO NOT CARE ABOUT US, OR IF THEY DO, I SAY 'GO HOME' AND THEY DO! WHAT?!? I had forgotten that is a possibility. Don't get me wrong, the mountains were incredible. I think about the magic I experienced up in Troutdale or in Hindman. Some of the best days on this trip so far. But I also think about some of those really intense hollers and unnamed communities, the way I felt claustrophobic in the mountains - the way you can never see out and how that must affect the mentality of people there....

These past three days I have been riding with a guy a around my age, Ed from Connecticut. He found himself more or less living the life he didn't want to lead, working everyday from morning till dawn, until he had basically lost himself. So he sold his business and decided to ride his bike across the country. I think about all our stories, each of us out here riding this ride. Dana and McKaylie (father daughter power duo on the tandem "Mud and Glamour n' guts") and how the trip started as a a joke between them and now here they are, doing a trip bonding family trip of a lifetime. Or Mark, while he never explicitly said so, just needing to do this. Watching the way he is so determined to get through the mountains. His tenacity. We all have different stories about why we are out here, but we are all bonded together by this common experience. There's not many in the overall population who are riding this ride, but there's something that made what, maybe a thousand or so people this summer, get on their bikes and cross America.

Sonnet

Caught -- the bubble

in the spirit level,

a creature divided;

and the compass needle

wobbling and wavering,

undecided.

Freed -- the broken

thermometer's mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!

~ ELIZABETH BISHOP

(Okay, everyone, I just have to say that I'm lying in bed in this incredible guest house in Sonora and it is about 10:00 and I keep hearing the clippity-clop of a horse trotting down the street. Up and down three times it has gone! Is someone riding at this hour?!)

And so as John Muir said, we are wandering for a summer, seeing things and meeting people living in THIS COUNTRY. Right now Ed, Dana and Mckaylie and I are staying at this amazing bed and breakfast in little Sonora, KY. The storms were a-raging today and this was the only stop to get out of the predicted severe rain and possible hail after biking 55 miles today. But what a find!! It's an incredible old house built in the late 1800's and Charlie, the owner, has had it in his family since about that time. He took us around the little town of about 400, telling about how connected his family has been here since the early 1900's.

Plus, my room has a clawfoot bathtub and one of those old flushing toilets with a string thing.... BEST SOAK OF MY LIFE! (Especially after the serious headwinds of today. So yeah, getting my first taste of those!)

So onward we roll, through what they call The Knobs of central Kentucky. (Funny, conical looking hills). We stayed in Harrodsburg, which as it turns out was the first permanent white settlement west of the Alleghenies, cycled through Bardstown, where there are more barrels of bourbon than people, and watched the farmers cutting and baling hay in earnest to beat the rain. Charlie (owner of our guesthouse) pulled out an actual map of the state and it really was eye opening to see how far we had come. We've almost biked across two whole states! I've almost biked 1000 miles. As Dana said, we can't say we're newbies anymore...

Ed got the princess bed

Day: 19 - we meet again! We met as we entered the mountains, and now we are back together as we exit!

LESSON: Check your maps!!!! I stayed with a Couchsurfing host family in Bardstown and as I was cycling into town I had this little voice saying 'check your addrss!" Well as we rode into town in the rain we stopped and I checked. Turns out I had ridden right past their house..... 6 miles back!!!!

P.S. I'm on the hunt for baby thoroughbreds! I'm told it's the season.... so come out come out wherever you are!!! (Because definitely in horse country now)