Then again...
You know, there's really only so much dampness a guy can take. I put in a good faith effort: two nights camping with the gear I hauled up the mountain. In the rain. In lots of rain. And when there wasn't rain, there was mist. Thick mist. Mist you could make a sandwich with.
This afternoon as I stood in the shelter of the camp's laundry shack doing my laundry with quarters scraped together from various random pockets and change from the Pepsi machine, I noted with interest that it had stopped raining. I had my laptop with me, and I also noted with interest that the NOAA weather forecast had changed again, upping the chance of rain tomorrow from 50% to an unprecedented 100% (it has since been lowered to 60%, of course). And I knew that I didn't want to do a 60-mile ride with climbs at the end of it in the sort of weather the NOAA hooligans were predicting. So, I packed up (in the rain, which started up again), and high-tailed it off the mountain and seven miles across the state line into Elkhorn City, where I write to you now from a somewhat dingy but reasonably-priced motel room that has every piece of my gear strewn all over it, drying out.
In order to get online, I had to solve a vexing technical problem: I accidentally turned on the Black Box switch that powers the cellular amplifier, and drained the big battery over the course of my stay at the campground. No power for the amp! Because I had only designed the Box to charge the battery with solar panels, the cloudy weather meant that I would be without a crucial piece of communications gear for several days, just as I was entering a state where cell signals are elusive. However: I have a big bag of AC adapters for all of my various gizmos and gadgets, and after a few minutes of experimenting I discovered that the adapter that powers my AA battery charger fits into the sockets on the Black Box that accept solar panel input. Success! Now I'm charging the battery, and powering the amplifier. The big antenna is actually outside the motel room door, with the cable running through a gap at the door's bottom, and with that setup I can eke out the bare minimum signal required to get online. There's a certain satisfaction in that.
Geeeeky satisfaction.
By coming here, I get to dry out, and I've shaved just a bit off the long haul I need to make to Pippa Passes. I also met four westbound cyclists. Two couples, one on a tandem and the other on singles. We ate dinner together at the restaurant next to the motel (I indulged in my cheeseburger thing, as I'm not riding tomorrow). Two of them - Katie and Mo - started out in New York City, came down through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and are headed west until Kansas. There, they'll hang a left and end up in Austin, Texas so that Katie can start grad school. Jesse and Taisha are from the Northwest, and flew out to the east coast so that they'd have a Coming Home instead of a Going Away party...now's the time to do it, they figured, before kids and the rest of life made the journey impossible. They're riding a Burley tandem, which means that their average speeds are a lot like mine. Fun people...they're all leaving for Pippa Pass tomorrow, but it's likely that I'll run into them again further along the route.
And now it's time for bed. I'm a day behind in storytelling...I'll put up a post about and pics of Saturday's ride tomorrow, honest.
But here's a photo of the first bit of scenery I encountered in Kentucky - that's the Russel Fork river at the bottom of the gorge.
Good night, all.
