Bike Trip - Day 6

We woke up at the inn, the weather forecast was rain, and all the clothes we had washed in the bathtub the night before were all still soaking wet! Operation dry our clothes begain. We put stuff on the heater and sat around blow drying other wet clothes. To achieve maximum efficiency, we ate breakfast in shifts; Tim ate while I sat around blow drying clothes, and then we switched jobs. I love the free breakfasts at motels; there are always bagels and a nice assortment of cereals and then all the pastries. I also like the milk and juice because we don't drink any on the trip since it spoils, and we seem to get soda when we buy cold drinks at the store. After about two hours of blow drying our clothes, we packed up, checked out of the motel, and set off on our way.

My left foot had started going numb while biking, but usually felt better after an hour or so later. However, today my foot was still numb when I woke up so we were somewhat concerned. The combination of this and the miserable weather forecast made us decide to do a short day of 30 to 40 miles and camp. We found our way back to the Atlantic Coast Trail and soon after the weather became miserable. It started raining...then rained harder...and harder...and eventually became an outright downpour where I could almost picture cats and dogs falling out of the sky. We finally arrived at the KOA campground and paid for a tent campsite. We set up the tent under the fly and got everything inside. We were wet and cold so we went to take hot showers, and then we miserably hunkered up inside of our cold, wet tent. We'd bought a bag of double stuff oreos and those quickly dissappeared so we decided we'd cook something hot with our stove made from Heineken cans. We didn't want to sit outside in the rain so we decided we'd cook in the vestibule of our tent and hold the fly away from the flames. It wasn't the most brilliant of ideas, but we managed not to burn our tent down and had a nice meal of beef pasta with bacon that we threw in. It was still storming like crazy outside, so we just set up our sleeping bags and fell asleep. Over the night, water seeped into the bottom of the tent because the shower curtain we were using as a footprint was too small (we bought a tarp the next day because of this) so the bottom of my sleeping bag was soaked through. I huddled into a ball in the dry portion of my sleeping bag but it was just an awful night.

Time with Tim:
...BUT THEY AREN'T DRY. Forecast says that it will be rain free until 2 PM, and we wasted two of these rain free hours drying stuff with the heater and a hair dryer. It was getting close to noon and I think ours was the last room needing to be cleaned so the cleaning lady set up camp outside our window. I closed the window blind and set the chainy-thing lock, which will teach her. 20 miles into our ride, it started POURING. We rode in this for 10 miles to the next campground. We ask for a tent site and the guy just looks at us (forecast was 1-2 inches of rain with severe flood warnings). So, we set up and get in our somewhat dry tent, and sleep.