TRANSAMERICA BICYCLE 2015: Days 18-20: Beam me up Scotty...

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)