This always happens...whatever the reasons for staying, no matter how sound, I always end up with the Motel Malaise. But I've gotten some work done today (which is why I'm still here, after all), and I'll be hitting the road tomorrow, bound for a campground near Burgin.
My new wheel arrived yesterday at 10:30 AM - Jerome managed to send it out overnight on Monday, with a day's delay because of July Fourth. I decided that I did, in fact, want to swap the new cassette for my current cassette, just because I know that the one I've got works, and it has worn together with the chain over the past several hundred miles. No point in changing it out before its time.
True to his word, Bernie was available to ferry me over to the bike shop in Lexington, where they swapped the cassette for me at no charge, and even had one of little plastic tools I needed for my two-piece cranks, which they also gave to me for free. I bought one before I left, then put it in storage with the rest of my bike-related stuff. I also picked up a spoke wrench, because I forgot to pack one, and a cheaper replacement headlight. Then, Bernie took me to the post office, so I could mail the old wheel back and ship out some other gear. We also hit Gall's, an outiftter where Bernie shops, so that I could pick up some more drybags and a few more bricks of campfood. He basically spent his afternoon taking me from place to place, and while he drove we talked about the possibility of turning part of his twelve acres and his basement into a place for cyclists like me to camp. He said that his encounter with me had inspired him, and that once his wife gets back from Alaska they'd talk about what would be feasible for them to do. He's a good man...if he sets something up, it'll be done right, and a boon to travelers.
Berea, unfortunately, turned out to be shut down for the Fourth. It's a college town, really, so it's slow in the summer to begin with, and around these parts many places close for the holiday. So on Tuesday I walked around town for a couple of hours, and then had to retreat back to the motel to escape the heat.
And yesterday? It poured. So, due to the circumstances with the hub, I was off the road and avoided the rain. Just one more little way that things worked out for the best this week.
Still, I've had three days off instead of the one I was originaly planning. I'm hoping that I'll be able to build up my mileage if the terrain is as un-mountainous as I've been hearing. I suspect, though, that there will be a series of smaller hills until I reach Illinois.
Total mileage so far: 787 (29 of those in Bernie's pickup). I'm going to try and put in a solid six days in a row (a first), so I should break 1,000 miles this week. It'll be nice to get out of triple-digit total mileage.
As always, after an extended stay in one place, there's the long process of packing everything back up into the trailer, out of which gear is inevitably strewn. (That's the trike in the foreground, serving as a drying rack.) With the new drybags, I should be able to pack the trailer a bit more efficiently...whether that will translate into less trailer bounce remains to be seen.
So, I'll spend the rest of the day doing that, a bit at a time, so that I can hit the road at a suitably early hour tomorrow. It looks like there will be stretch of good weather for the next few days, with reasonable temperatures, so I'll try to get the miles behind me. It'll be just under 40 miles tomorrow, because experience has taught me that trying for higher mileage after an overlong rest period doesn't work very well at all.
That seems to be the way of this journey so far...stretches of mundane and often boring inactivity punctuated by wrenching physical effort and, increasingly, amazing experiences. I'll have to work on reducing the mundanity by stepping up the number of days that I spend in motion...as I understand it, that's one of the defining characteristics of, you know...cycling across the country.
On Saturday, I pulled a 59-miler to get to a campground in Bardstown, Kentucky, anticipating six straight days of riding. Not all 60-milers, of course, but I was ready to start hammering. I hadn't done the math in terms of days left in the decent season and miles left to go, but I knew that the numbers probably weren't good. At the campsite, I met Lonnie and Debbie, who were kind enough to share their meal with me, and were good company. Cell phone service was hit or miss, but I called the only motel I'd be passing for the next five or six days to make a reservation. There was something about the fellow who answered that made me ask whether they had phones in the rooms. Sure enough, they didn't.
Then again...I could...skip ahead to the end. Pack all my gear up and high-tail it across the country to Astoria, then cycle 1,100 miles down the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara.
