Rocky Mount to South Boston Photologo

An example of what sleeping looks like. Yup. Exciting, right?

I didn't take too many photos today because my phone was busy navigating, but in general what's up is that lots of tobacco plants showed up, as well as the first big stands of pine tree's that I've seen since Oregon.


Melinda's "road"

Yes Melinda (the google map's voice), this definitely is a road you should route bikes on.

Clearly a great road.

Virginia is for farmers, I guess.

It took us awhile to figure out what these plants were. My first Tobacco field!

Oh... Hi Rob... I didn't see you there.

This photo doesn't quite show how melting we all were.

Tobacco!


And moooore Tobacco!


Our cue-sheet for the day. Yeesh.


It was Morgan's birthday. This happened.

Rocky Mount to South Boston

Whelp, we made it through the Appalachians!  Today was hot!  They are having a heat wave here, and for the last pile of days we've been in over 90 degree weather and very humid.  I'd throw it up as worse than many of the days I've dealt with riding in Iowa. It was rough.

Fun of course. I love tough days like this. I love that we've had 3,000 to 6,000 feet of climbing every day for the last three or four days. Today was somewhere around 3,000 feet of climbing over 82 miles, with 6:31 on bike and riding from around 7am to 3:30 pm.   The guys did only 77 miles, but I added in a 5 mile loop because I forgot my water bottles at our Hardee's lunch spot.  We did the Appalachians with repeated 70-80 mile days and finding our own route. That's hard-core.

Our route was complicated and required a cue sheet of over 27 turns. I only got off it once, but was able to re-find it. This was good since I was navigating for Aaron, Rob, and Tom too. They are perfectly fine navigators without me, but I happened to be doing it this time.  I used Melinda's (Rob's name for Google Map's voice) voice directions for most of it too, but didn't end up needing her because the cue-sheet worked fine (mental note.)

Despite the heat, the riding today was great and a lot of standard touring fun things happened.  The stand-out - which I'll remember forever - was about a 3-mile stretch of "gravel" that Melinda sent us down. Melinda doesn't differentiate between gravel and paved roads, or in this case, between roads and ATV tracks that have signs that say "motorized vehicles recommended."  I'm not sure why Google hasn't thought of this feature yet...

This road was, by far, the most ridiculous thing I've ever ridden on during a bike tour.  It was very steep up and down, and a mix between dirt, gravel, bare rock, and river bed (no really, at one point the road appeared to be a drainage with flowing water).  Until now the two worst roads I've been on were in 2014 - a terrible seamed road in South Dakota on highway 14, and some ridiculous boulder gravel roads in northern Wisconsin.  

This was the worst and best by far.  It was super fun.  I've never full-on mountain biked on a fully loaded touring bike before, and we all had a great time.  Except Joe. He took a different route because the route finding wouldn't work for his phone and he wanted an early in to beat the heat. Sucker.

Long story short, Melinda cannot be trusted. I'm not sure if she's evil, incompetent, or just trying  to keep my life exciting.  Either way, it's best to keep a close eye on her suggestions I think.

Tonight we are recuperating from near heat stroke in the home of Morgan's relatives Steven and Virginia and their 10-year-old twins Conner and Aaron. They took us out to a great dinner and we're watching olympics tonight. It's also Morgan's birthday, so fun things happened.

Tomorrow we have a 29 mile relaxed and relatively flat day to more of Morgan's relatives in Chase City, and then we average 40 miles a day or so all the way to Virginia Beach on Aug 19th.  The tour is ramping down for the Nebraskans (riding since early June) and the 'Stralians (riding since early May). I'm just getting started though, but 2-3 weeks and over a 1,000 miles is pretty good considering all the other fun things I also did this summer.

Life's pretty good. ILYI

Newport to Rocky Mount photos

Riding out of Welch with the crew, lights on for safety - which never takes a holiday.

Morgan, gazing deeply into the morning haze.


Morgan likes to get too close to me for selfies.

Back Morgan, back!


This felt like being near the ocean.


Such great road!


Goiing into Christianburg/Blackburg, we ffund West Virginia's and Virginias and Kentucky's and Southern Ohio's 1st bike lane!

I dunno. This is Rob.

Virginia is much more pastoral that West Virginia.

TIN HATS!




Rob going the extra 5 yards.



Rob looks like he's riding my bike.

666 road. What it is.

Watching Olympics.  We won, the Stralian's lost. These thing happen.

Newport, VA to Rocky Mount, VA

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. :)

Welch to Newport photoloto

It took me over a day to get good enough internet to upload these, so I might have forgot stuff. This was our morning fog in Welch.

Riding out of Welch at 7am gave awesome views.

Aaron, Morgan, Tom, and Rom. Joe was already done for the day or something, he's fast.


Our pass-through towns were all long and drawn out. This was our third(?) day on highway 52, not a bad highway, but heavy on traffic at times.

Nice WV views.




Wait, what, are we in Buffalo?

Waiting for a flagger on highway 20. This wasn't so bad. The nice thing about flagger roads is once you get past you get long breaks in traffic.

The sign is selling Banana Fluffer Nuts, or something like that.

We visited the WV welcome center on our way out of WV. They did not have Virginia maps because cooperations is for hippies, I guess.

The 'Stralians needed some ironic Trump shirts for home. The "best" one was "Life's a Bitch, Don't Vote for One" with a picture of Hillary.  They didn't get that one.

Aaron recovered Rob's lost Red's hat. Pay attention rob!

Highway 460 in WV wasn't bad... (stay tuned)


That billboard says to be born again, and is signed by Jesus.  I feel like Jesus could give better signs than a billboard, but who am I to judge Jesus.  Also, Judge Jesus would make a great spanish-language court show.


Something like 6 states and 830 miles into my trip we made it here. They've been going for thousands, of course.

I liked this thing.

A nice Virginia side road. Rob says Hi!


Train train train waiting for the train train train



Hey look what we found. I guess the 4,500+ of climbing we did does mean we are in the mountains.

460 in Virginia sucked ass. Super busy, no shoulder in most places, and the spots with shoulders were loose gravel.

I got off onto a side road eventually. Virginia has much more open space than West Virginia.



Our home for the night.

We took a ride into Blackburg, home of Virginia Tech for a Virginia bike map. It sucked.  Oh well.  We bought 24 tacos while there, so that was cool.