Alabama trip, Day 3, Tue March 28, Marion KY to Wrangler’s Campground

Originally posted on LiveJournal, 21-Apr-2006

I gave myself an extra nap after breakfast. I was tired after 165 miles in the first two days.

Even without the nap and subsequent late start, it would be too much to get to Tennessee today. The route to Tennessee would be along the Land Between the Lakes, a national recreational area between the Cumberland and Tennessee River reservoirs. There was a campground on the Kentucky side of the border — the Wrangler’s Campground — which would make for a 60 mile ride.

Myra wondered if that place wasn’t just for horse people. I figured they’d let anyone camp, and whose horses would be there at this time of year, anyway? (We learned the answer later in the day: Lots of people, lots of horses.)

The Land Between the Lakes has a 45-mile north-south road running the length of it called “The Trace”. That would be good for riding. But first I had to ride 30 miles to get there. I also had to cross the Cumberland River. The obvious place looked like it might be on a busy route.

The road out of Marion (US-641) had more truck traffic than I would like, but it was navigable:

The community of Crayne had a post office, so I did a quick stop to ask if there was a ferry across the Cumberland at Dycusberg. If I could go there, it looked like it would take me to back roads that might be more relaxing. I interrupted the postal clerk who was chatting with a customer. No, there was no ferry there. I noted that from the maps it looked like there had been one at one time. “Not in my lifetime,” was the cheerful response.But the good thing was that when I got back on my bike and started riding again, for the first time that day I no longer felt tired.

At Fredonia my route and most of the truck traffic went different ways. The ride to Eddyville was one of the more pleasant segments I had in Kentucky. I stopped to smell the flowers. Well, no, I didn’t smell them. But I saw my first daffodils of the year so had an excuse to take a photo break:

And another:

The route from Eddyville to the beginning of The Trace was on a busy, somewhat boring highway with a wide shoulder. In some places the highway construction idiots had messed up the shoulder with poorly placed rumble strips, but the only real problem was the long bridge across the Cumberland River. The roadway was narrow, with not enough room for trucks plus a bicycle to fit. I waited until there was no traffic behind me for as far as I could see (a mile or so) and then took off. It wasn’t until I was just about to the other side that trucks started to accumulate behind me. One of them felt compelled to blast its horn at me after I was already out of the way, presumably because I had caused it a quarter-second delay.

It had seemed that my shifting hadn’t been working right the past two days, as if the cable was starting to fray already. I had just replaced it and all the housings last fall. (One set of cable housings every 20,000 miles is not too bad, I figured.) And this time I didn’t have a spare with me. So when I got onto the Trace, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bike shop, the Wood-n-Wave. The bike mechanic was a multi-tasker, doing phone calls with a headset while working on bikes and dealing with customers. He and the other person on duty, a woman older than he, helped me find the right cable as well as other odds and ends. She then went to great lengths to try to answer my questions about bike routes through Tennessee. After I reached the south end of this Trace I would need to find my way to the Natchez Trace. She looked on all the maps she had, tried to look up possibilities on the Internet, and made careful color copies of such highway maps that she had. I asked Mr. Multi-Tasker Guy if Highway 13 was any good for bicycling. He didn’t know, so I said I’d go and find out for myself.

The Trace was easy enough riding:

At the 40-mile mark there was a picnic area where I heated water for a cup of soup and coffee. I had not found any good coffee on the road so far on this trip. Even the McDonalds coffee, which sometimes is passable back home, was like watery church-basement coffee in this part of the world. At Eddysville I had bought a cup of gas station coffee which turned out to be rancid — too long since brewing. Usually I would complain politely and wait for them to brew some fresh to replace the undrinkable stuff. But in this case I paid for it and went out and dumped it on the grass, then went over to a small restaurant to buy a cup. But that was the same insipid, watery stuff I had been finding elsewhere. So it had been a long time, but now I finally got a good cup of coffee on the road by brewing it myself. It was a special occasion and I took a photo.

Twenty miles later, when I was almost at the campground, I encountered the steepest hill I had seen on this trip. I got off and walked my bike up. Myra caught me doing it, too. She had driven out with the car to look for me, and that’s where she found me, a couple of miles from the destination.The bad news was she had discovered that we had left our tent poles at home. There were some camping cabins at this campground, but the campground managers claimed there weren’t any that were available. She didn’t quite believe that, and hung around the office, refusing to leave until they finally discovered that there was one available, after all.

Also, she warned me that I would need to walk my bike from the office to our cabin, a distance of about a quarter mile. She assured me they were serious about that rule. When she explained that were a lot of horses and riders there, I could understand why. So when I rode my bike up to the office, I was prepared to be the very spirit of cooperation. I do always try to be careful when I encounter horses while riding. Amish driving horses are used to just about everything, but when their draft horses are pulling a wagon on the road, I do everything I can to avoid causing surprises. I’m even more careful around non-Amish horses, and the riders usually appreciate it.

This was the first evening that I had a little energy left at the end of the day. Maybe this riding-myself-into-shape thing was working. Also, it may have helped that I had done only 61 miles that day.