Bike Trip - Day 10

We woke up at the firehall and since we didn't have to pack everything (tent, etc), we were off to an early start by 8 am! Our good luck didn't last longer than 5 minutes as Tim realized that his back tire was loose. He tightened it, and we set off again....and 5 seconds later the tire of the b.o.b. trailer went kaput! We chilled on the side of the road replacing the tube, and some guy gave us a free pencil. Then we off to really start our day. We were in the appalachian foothills so the terrain got increasingly hilly. We passed through Monticello which is where Thomas Jefferson lived, and we met two credit-card tourers named Mary and Mike. They were very nice and they were biking to Oregon. We bumped into them repeatedly throughout the day because of random stops on both parties part. They were planning to stay in Charlottesville that night, where is where the University of VA is located. When we were passing through Charlottesville, we were in search for a bike store on our map that ended up being nowhere to be found. Confused, we got some cold drinks from Starbucks and sat on the curb for a while. I stopped at a weird hippy-dreamy style bookstore and picked up a book and two postcards; one for Nene and one for Tim's grandmother. We decided we weren't ready to call it a day yet, so we kept biking and after a while we stopped to take some photographs of the mountains. A bike mechanic stopped by and was very enthusiastic about our trip and told us about some touring couples ahead of us. He also gave us some tips for the upkeep of our bikes. We set off again, and finally we founded a campground called Misty Mountain, where we exhaustedly set up our tent. We opened the bottle of strawberry wine that we purchased the day before, and neither of us were fans of the wine. Tim ended up drinking the whole bottle, became somewhat drunk, and passed out in the tent after wandering to and from the showers. I wrote the postcard for Nene, and after showering I fell asleep too. We biked 73 or 74 miles!

Time with Tim:
I started the day wondering how I could cause some excitement. About 0.2 miles into the ride, I somehow broke the b.o.b. trailer so it started hopping with each wheel revolution. Good thing I wasn't going down a hill. I needed to replace the tube and reattach the wheel. While fixing, a friendly dude in a truck gave us a pencil with the greeting, "Now you can remember Mineral, VA!" I'm writing this entry 5 days after the fact and I have no idea where the pencil is now. Oh well. Nothing else out of this day merits much discussion, but we passed Monticello and couldn't find the bike store. The wine we had was not very good, and Perry made me drink the whole bottle. I needed to tune up the bike derailleurs so I clumsily did that. I then decided to take a shower and went back to the tent and fell asleep.