Hello Appalachia! – Day 43

Date: Monday 20th September   

Route:  Harrodsburg, Kentucky – Booneville, Kentucky 

Distance: 103 miles  

Total climb: 6965ft 

Net climb:  -242ft

The Days Inn, Harrodsburg had afforded us the chance to get back on an even keel.  We were rested, our clothes were washed, and in the morning we were distinctly breakfast proud.  All of this, though, was a prelude to entering Appalachia, which most of the cyclists whom we had met and were doing the TransAmerica route from East to West had told us was the hardest section of the route.  We were slightly nervous at the prospect.

Team Stockham dropped us off in the centre of Harrodsburg (the motel was a few miles outside of town on the “business loop” – the blight of all American towns) and after a quick stop at a gas station to refill Fred’s rear tire we were heading out of town.  Sadly, our route did not take us past the row of enormous houses that we had seen in the twilight the previous evening and which seemed to have jumped straight off the pages of the Great Gatsby.  We did, however, pass the site of the home of Daniel Boone – one of the original pioneers of the interior and the man who was responsible for making an accessible route through the Appalachian Mountains for people travelling West.  It wasn’t much, but for me it provided at least some encouragement that we would be able to make it through the Appalachian wilderness.

The day began in much the same way as the previous day had ended, riding through the rolling Kentucky countryside.  Our first stint was a 26 mile stretch before stopping at a shop a few miles from the town of Buckeye.  It was already hot and so a soda fountain was exactly what was required.  There was no soda fountain.  It was, though, the oddest shop that I have ever been in.  Inside a large building there were very few items on sale, and those that were on sale made up a distinctly bizarre selection.  The shelves were stacked such that there would be one can of peas, then a foot of empty space and then a solitary bottle of anti-freeze.  Fortunately, they did stock cold drinks and chocolate bars and so met our requirements nicely.  Unfortunately my Twix tasted as if it was about 15 years old and was the most likely cause of some severe digestive issues that I encountered over the next 36 hours.

We left the shop puzzled, but refreshed and headed on towards our lunchtime stop, Berea, “the Gateway to the Appalachians”.  The final few miles into town took us along the Beebe-White Bike path.  As ever it was a joy to be off the road, and it gave us the opportunity to really enjoy the ride into a beautiful university town which is also home to an extraordinary school, designed, I can only speculate, by one of the creators of the Jetsons.

Berea College has a remarkable history (seriously – it’s worth a read on Wikipedia) as the first non-segregated college of higher education in the South; and now offers a free college education to the people of the Appalachians, on the basis that the students work in the local community.  This approach to education, combined with some beautiful architecture makes for a hugely friendly and welcoming town.  When added to the best lunch of the trip at the Main Street Cafe (including a bizarre but very tasty German Chocolate Cake) and an invite from some of the students in the cafe to stay for the evening and come to a college party it was exceedingly difficult to leave.  Sadly our schedule was tight and we couldn’t afford to lose another half-day.  We had to push on into Appalachia.

I had been worried about the Appalachians (or Apple-chians as we had taken to calling them) from the beginning of the trip; I had heard that services would be limited, that the hills were very steep and that the people did not welcome travellers (I also know the plot of the film “Deliverance”).  There was some truth in the first two of these points, but the third could not have been more wrong.  The people of Appalachia proved to be as helpful, friendly and kind as their countrymen and women had been throughout the whole of our trip.  They might, at times have been fairly difficult to understand (the accent is strong, to say the least), but time and time again, people went out of their way to help us, in entirely selfless ways.  In this respect at least, we have a lot to learn from our American cousins. 

Still, enough moralizing and back to the narrative…Five miles outside of Berea we stopped at the town of Bighill to refill our bottles and were delighted to find that our route took us away from the geographical feature that had inspired the town’s name.  Instead, we hugged the edge of the valley floor, for the most part following Red Lick Creek.  The hills around grew increasingly tall and steep and it was apparent to us that an artificial sundown, created by the hills would mean that we were going to be cycling on into the dark once again.  The upside was that we had a thirty mile ride with no hills whatsoever, which allowed us to make good time and provided a gentle introduction to Appalachia.  The most remarkable (if slightly macabre) element of this stretch of the ride, was the large number of family cemeteries that were visible from the road.  It became clear to us that they were placed on any point of raised ground – presumably in an attempt to avoid the flooding of the steep-walled valleys.

We were in a race against the gathering dark, and after narrowly avoiding an oncoming car on the originally named “Flat Bottom Road” we finally had some climbing to do.  We made short work of the climb and once at the top we had left the fairly dense forest behind and were back out into open farmland.   Having not seen Team Stockham since breakfast, we made a series of attempts to contact them, but with limited reception we did not hold out much hope that they would get our texts or answer-phone messages.

As we pushed on and back down into the valleys it started to get distinctly cold, and at one point I began to feel the impending onset of a sugar low (in much the same way as I had in Montana weeks earlier).  Fortunately, three Clif Shot Blocks came to my rescue and we made it to the crossroads at Vincent in good shape.  By this time it was dark and cold, but we knew there were only seven miles to go and that there were no more climbs.  For me, it was perhaps the easiest seven miles of the trip so far, and the day was rounded off perfectly by the final two mile downhill into Booneville where we stopped at the BP garage.  It was just past 9pm. 

It had been a big day – 103 miles – in which the terrain had changed completely from rolling fields to a forest covered mountain range; but the day was not over yet.  We were informed by a group of locals that there was no accommodation in Booneville, we still had no word from Team Stockham, and we had no idea where they were.  Eventually we managed to hail them on the phone, only to discover that they were in Berea and seriously worried about our wellbeing – they had driven the entire route back from Booneville and not seen us, which was impossible.  In any event they were delighted that we had made it to the end of the route and set off to join us.  While we waited we were comforted by the joys of two Hunt Brothers Pizzas (a mainstay in gas station nutrition) and, in my case, an indecent amount of Coca Cola.

Finally we were reunited with Team Stockham and after loading up Tammy, we sped off to McKee where they had arranged rooms at the Town and Country motel.  Newly refurbished, it was a sight for tired eyes.  All that remained was to solve the mystery of how Team Stockham had missed us.  The answer – their newer set of maps gave an entirely different route from Berea to Booneville.  With mother Stockham vindicated, we resolved that at the start of every subsequent day we would check to ensure that our maps were in fact taking us along the same route.   

Points to note:

• Fred received the less considerate end of road courtesy from a gentleman in a pickup truck, on the road out of Harrodsberg. The two exchanged differences of opinion on fiscal policy, social provision, and the desirability of seeing the country by bike; all through the window of said pickup whilst climbing up hill.