Date: Tuesday 21st September
Route: Booneville, Kentucky – Hindman, Kentucky
Distance: 64 miles
Total climb: 4,675ft
Net climb: 289ft
The day began with our first Dairy Queen (or “DQ”) meal of the trip. A solid breakfast was made memorable by the “servers” who not only found our accents hilarious, but also insisted on making one of their number, whom they described as “the biggest hillbilly in Kentucky”, say various words in her incredibly strong accent. Thus “hair” became “herr” and other words became completely unrecognisable.
After packing up and heading back to Booneville, we had a quick photo session before getting back out on the road. The first leg of our day to Buckhorn was magnificent. Surrounded by the same mountains and forests as the previous day, we could now see that everything in the valleys was completely covered by a type of vine, lending a mysterious air to the landscape. Trees, pylons and fences were made to look as if they had been lifted from the set of an Indiana Jones movie and it was easy to imagine that a lost temple lurked just around every corner. We had also moved definitively into “fall” and so at various times in the morning we were covered by a deluge of golden leaves. It was a magical 18 miles.
We stopped in Buckhorn for our morning break at the local post-office, outside of which stood a group of about 8 men. Fred was initially wary of leaving the bikes outside, however our fears were allayed when we discovered that 7 of the men were pastors and one was the owner of the shop (what is the collective noun for pastors?). The group told us the history of Buckhorn and the local wooden church, known as the Cathedral of the Mountains, which had been built by the congregation. We signed the cyclists’ log in the post office and stocked up on drinks and snacks before noticing that Team Stockham had also stopped in the town on the other side of the road. They had been in the rival shop, chatting with the owner who apparently bore a striking resemblance to Jabba the Hut.
Team Stockham headed off to explore Buckhorn Lake, while we headed back out on the road. Safe to say the rest of our day was not the most pleasant cycling of the trip. Pretty soon after Buckhorn our route took us onto the main roads that are used for transporting coal out of the Appalachians. For the first few miles there was no hard shoulder; this was probably the scariest section of the entire route as cars and lorries flew past us with little more than a couple of feet of space. Fortunately, after that section the road gods were kind to us and provided wide hard shoulders (or as Team Heagney had christened them earlier in the trip “hard wide shoulders”) for the rest of our time on SR 15 and SR 80. The hard shoulders were good for alleviating the feeling of mortal terror; nonetheless they were not that easy to cycle on, covered as they were by huge amounts of detritus – from lumps of coal and broken glass to bungee cords and an abandoned kettle. Still, they allowed us to spend a bit more time looking at our surroundings and see the peculiar results of strip mining. All around us hills had been completely denuded of soil and left as strange man-made rock formations. What was left was an unquestionably odd, but strangely beautiful landscape.
After a stretch of undulating main road (which looked far more difficult on our elevation map than it actually was to cycle) we finally turned off the main roads at the wonderfully named town of Dwarf. From there onwards we had an enjoyable 16 mile ride along a stream, with barely a car in sight until we reached our finishing point at Hindman. With a bizarrely good level of co-ordination, we arrived just as Team Stockham were parking in the centre of town. Once again there was no accommodation nearby, save for one motel which Team Stockham had refused to book due to its uncanny resemblance to the Bates Motel and the fact that the room that they were shown (and presumably, therefore, one of the better rooms) had a hole in the ceiling. Instead we headed to the Combs Motel in the nearby town of Hazard (Kentuckians have a real talent for town naming it seems). It was in the process of renovation, and had no internet, but with retro wood-panelling and a decent shower it offered everything we could have asked for.
We planned to get some serious blogging done, but first was the small matter of dinner. Appleby’s was our go-to option in yet another business loop, but the difficulty was getting there. After G2 (the replacement GPS system bought in Carbondale) had taken us a variety of different ways around the car parks of a local school, we finally found our way out and into the welcoming arms of “Your Neighbourhood Bar and Grill.” Another heroic performance from my new favourite restaurant left us ready for an evening of blogging. As ever Fred managed to write an entry in the space of half-an-hour. After 75 minutes, I had almost finished mine…
The Parkes and Stockham Cycle Part 2: TransAmerica 
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