Bike Trip - Day 11

The morning was wet with dew, sunny, and pretty. We packed up and set off on relatively flat terrain. Suddenly the terrtain was no longer flat, but vertical. We climbed higher...and higher...and higher. Eventually, Tim suffered some navigational difficulties and claimed the map and GPS wanted us to take a gravel road. Well...OK...I guess... So we keep climbing, higher and higher, on this gravel road when it suddenly ends. A local who was out for a hike said that we had two options. We could either ride back down and ride up the same hill via another (paved) road, or push our bikes a third of a mile up an old stagecoach trail. Neither of us was interested in reclimbing Mt. Horror so we got off our bikes and pushed for quite longer than either of us would have wished to. We eventually found the appalachian trail, pushed our bikes along that for a while, and this brought us to the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was noon or so. We'd been biking for 3 or 4 hours...and we'd probably only traveled 5 miles. We were really hungry so we ate some beef jerky, peanut butter, and granola bars before we started pedaling again. The mountains wanted to destroy us and we climbed higher..and higher...and higher...up to around 3000 feet, where Tim declares "on the plus side, I think this is the highest we climb!"

Then we climbed another 200 feet...and kept climbing and climbing and climbing. We were so hungry and tired and around 2:00 PM, we found a deli in Love Gap. We devoured two subs, an entire bag of doritos, and some iffy tasting cookies. The son of the deli lady was very nice and sat to chat with us for a while. He told us to visit a place called Gerties if we stayed in Vesuvius that night. We continued south on the Blue Ridge Parkway and surprise, surprise, we kept climbing and climbing and climbing. Our max elevation for the day was 1018 meters above sea level, and we had started around 213 meters above sea level. Then we turned off the Blue Ridge Parkway and we were met with the most daunting downhill ride I've ever experienced. We were practically riding the brakes, racing downhill at 40 mph, and going around hairpin turns in a rapid semi-controlled descent down the mountain. We dropped 1500 feet in two miles of riding. It was 6:30 PM or so, and we had spent 8 hours or so climbing 30ish miles and less than 15 minutes descending it. We were looking for the campground we saw on our map, and it ended up leading us to Gerties! It turned out that Gerties let you camp behind their store! Inside the store, there were millions of signatures all over the walls from motorcyclists and cyclists! We camped out back, had delicious pulled pork sandwiches from Gerties for dinner, gotfree water, and fell asleep very happy.

Time with Tim:
We were (stupidly) excited to begin climbing mountains today. We started out climbing normal switchbacks, which turned into gravel trails, which turned into a dead end deader than Vanilla Ice's career in music. A local pointed us up a little trail that led to the appalachian trail, when then led us to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We had to push our bikes about half a mile through all of that. Then we had a pleasant climb on the Blue Ridge parkway. Some tourists gawked openly at us and our bikes at a rest stop. We slept at a country store and had some tasty food. It rained all night (like usual). At this point I've come to consider rain as the natural state that VA likes best.