Virginia is very different from West Virginia in a few very key ways. Firstly, it's doing a lot better. It must have some kind of industry that isn't coal, because the towns here all seem to be doing fine. It's just as mountainous - at least the areas we've been through - but it's less wooded and more pastoral. West Virginia just seems "darker" in a way than Virginia does. It was like riding through a dirty rain forest or jungle, whereas Virginia looks like a much hillier Southern Ohio or even Southern Iowa at times.
Virginia also has way more rideable country roads that West Virginia does, and we cracked the code for route planning last night. We stayed mostly on 3-digit country roads and had a great 77 mile day with almost no time on busy roads and only a tiny amount of gravel. The route finding was complicated at times, but worth it. You couldn't find smaller roads like that in WV. 'Course, these roads aren't on any paper maps that we can find, but Google seems to work ok. I use Google's "bike there" mostly, but I planned a 10-mile detour for this morning to avoid their routing on the evil 460 and it was awesome! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I feel like I'm pretty good at bike tour routing.
It's stupid humid here, so it's really hard to work our phones to check routes or zoom. It's like riding in the rain how wet we constantly are. I can wring out my cycling gloves like my hands have been in water.
We did 77 miles with 6,000 feet of climbing today, with some grades at 16-18%. Western mountains don't generally get above 8%. We rode from about 7am to 3:30 or 4pm, with 6:06 on bike. It was tiring, hot, and awesome. I'm really enjoying these Virginia mountains. I'm not sure if they are the Appalachians or a different range, but this is our third day in them and so far I love them.
Joe rode out ahead because he's a rocket pants, and Rob, Aaron, and I mostly stuck together for navigation and fun purposes. The hardest part of the day was doing a 36 miles push with no water stops. We can't really tell when towns will hit our weird routes (google sucks for that), so we're just carrying tons of water and hoping we don't die. Well, I am. Rob and especially Tom apparently don't need water to survive.
Tonight we're staying with Jim and Missy about 5.7 miles and up a huge hill from town. Jim is a pastor in the local Methodist church, and they cooked us a great dinner.
Tomorrow is only 3,000 feet of climbing, with a net downhill, and 75 ish miles. It'll probably be our last day in the mountains, and probably more just rolling foothills. The routing has about 27 different turns on tiny unmapped roads, so Joe wrote out a cue sheet and I'll be experimenting with using Google's voice navigation all day, powered by my solar panel. I've never had to resort to that for route finding before, but I look forward to testing it. Before smart phones we'd probably just take busier roads. Screw that. Adventure!
Every state has it's different challenges. :)
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