Ach, I'm tired so I'm going to try to keep this one quick. Today was another great day of riding and super beautiful. It started with about 30 miles of highway 52 in West Virginia, which was awesome albeit a bit busy. Most drivers gave us lots of space, but both Aaron and I were run off the road by a semi-truck; likely the same semi-truck since I was about 10 minutes ahead of him.
We did something over 2-3 thousand feet of climbing in the first 30 miles, then turned onto a much calmer highway 20 for a bit more. There we finally left the WV valley system and rode along some highlands for about 10 miles. We passed through Princeton, WV which was a really cool town with lots of murals.
Then we hopped on highway 460 which had nice wide shoulders but lots of traffic and crossed into Virginia! After that it was a sweet bike-trail like side-road for a few miles.
And then, disaster. We had to get back on 460, but the Virginia version on 460 is four lanes of traffic and no-shoulder. It was hell. We got to Pembroke, our planned stay for the night, but Morgan was unable to secure a spot (not his fault) so we had nine more miles to push to Newport. Six of those along 460 again (all nine for the others who didn't find the idyllic awesome side road that I did near the end.)
In total I rode from about 7am to 5pm (Joe got in way earlier), with 6:46 on bike, 82 miles, and about 4,500 feet of climbing. Highlights include the 'stralians buying Trump shirts from a roadside stand, the WV welcome center laughing at me when I asked for a Virginia map (they don't cooperate, I guess), and just great riding. Tonight we stay in a church of some sort.
The route tomorrow is complicated since we are going out of our way to avoid more 460. We picked up an official Virginia bike map, but it's completely shit, so we're doing all our routing via google and then drawing our own maps. The bike map only has pre-made routes, no useful information for creating your own routes. Almost none of the roads we are taking tomorrow are big enough to be on a normal map. That should be nice.
Tomorrow *should* be a 72 mile day with about 4,700 feet of climbing. We'll see. I better rest to prepare. That's still a hard day.
ILYI
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