92km, 12th September
I am typing this from a restaurant in a little place called Buffalo. Whilst I don’t want to be disrespectful to the cast of characters in here, no one appears remotely normal. One out of five other people here appears to be fairly functional, two were unfunctional, and two just aren’t doing much, so I can’t really tell how functional they are, but I’m not particularly optimistic for them. This is really weird. I am slightly fearful of what will appear on my plate when it arrives. Ah, I lie, someone else has walked in, who appears to function, and she came from the direction of the kitchen. Ah, except the cook has just walked out. I think that I would feel better if she had been washing her hands, rather than wiping them for what appears to be weeks, on her gigantic t-shirt. I am sorry if what I have written is offensive, but I don’t really know how to describe the cast. This is really odd though, I really wouldn’t be surprised if some random trace of nuclear fallout was discovered here to explain this.
We changed time zones yesterday, and lost an hour. I guess after not much cycling yesterday, I wasn’t particularly tired, and struggled to get to sleep at a decent hour. Hugh’s snoring has reached new decibels. I slept unusually badly, and then woke up an hour before the alarm. Annoying. I assume this is our last time zone change.
Above – a typically not-so-interesting Kentucky town
The day was quite a nice cycling day. The hills were fine, and the temperature was cool. It rained hard this morning, and at one point this afternoon was really cold, but for most of the day it felt nice to not be too hot. There is loads of corn in this area. I expected Kansas to be one big corn field – which it wasn’t, or there wasn’t as much as I was expecting, and didn’t think that there would be much in Kentucky, but there is loads. Quite a lot of soy as well, and some tobacco leaf. The other day there was rusty red coloured sorghum, but that isn’t so popular here.
The dogs haven’t been as bad as I was expecting. I was expecting constant chasing. Most are tied up, which is definitely lucky. Yesterday I was chased by a vicious little thing, whilst going downhill. I didn’t want to go too fast, which might excite the dog further, and so had both hands on the brakes, unable to locate my ultrasonic Dog Dazer in my handlebar bag. Hugh picked up a similar product, the Bark Genie at a Walmart, but he was too far away for it to work. These ultrasonic things are absolutely amazing, I would highly recommend them to cyclists. We tell all the cyclists, and bike shops, about them, they’re just brilliant. I also think that the more times a dog gets dazed by this crazy noise, the less they will continue to pester the pedlars, which would be good. There was one bananas dog today, that was running around a pickup as it was moving – at nearly normal speed. It chased it about 100 metres, that we saw. We literally decided to make a run for it whilst the dog was distracted by the pickup. I have no idea how that dog hasn’t been run over. Oh, today, a dog got really close to being squashed as it nearly ran in front of a car to get to us. I’m really worried about that happening. The driver just didn’t see them at all, careering over the grass towards the road, which is fair enough really, when there are cyclists on the road that are demanding the drivers attention more than whatever is happening in their periphery.
Kentucky drivers have been much nicer than the crazy Missouri drivers, touch wood. A few drivers in the last couple of days have refused to overtake us, even when they have had clear views of the road ahead. It’s got weird actually, and annoying, as the drivers behind the nervous guys get angry with us, rather than the dude who is incompetent at overtaking us. We normally have to pull of the road to let everyone pass. You might think that we should pull over for everyone and anyone struggling to overtake us straightaway. If you think this, you have no idea how many people pass us as we cycle across a continent. It would be a ridiculous thing to do.
At the end of today, we hit a highway into Bardsville at rush hour. I’m actually really surprised that the route took us on this road, which was narrow, with no shoulder, and quite a lot of traffic. The brakes of one car screeched horribly loudly as they overtook us and were faced with oncoming traffic. Whilst we weren’t in particular danger on this road, I felt that the chance of a driver at some point unsafely overtaking a cyclist resulting in a head on collision is not insignificant. The last camp site is 50 odd miles away, and I suspect a lot of cyclists have a longer day than we had today, so most will hit the road in the busier rush hour.
Yet another school bus loaded with kids overtook me today without being able to see a clear path. It then sat behind Hugh for a while, revving, with kids swearing at him out the window. Lovely. I feel bad that we often cycle slightly apart, so cars have to overtake us twice (we stuck together on the final busy road of the day), but it’s hard to maintain constant speed together (today, for example, Hugh was faster on the flat, but I’m comparatively better at the uphills). But the cars overtake so blindly that I either need to so close to Hugh that I’m literally drafting, or there needs to be a big enough gap between us for the cars to return back to their side of the road with very little notice. I don’t like following very close to Hugh, because it’s much harder to spot fast approaching potholes, and because I place great importance on using my momentum from a downhill to get myself as far up an uphill as possible, whereas Hugh doesn’t seem to bother with pedalling until he has lost momentum. I get very antsy whenever I have to needlessly brake to avoid going into Hugh, so hang back.
Elevation profile of the day, ignore the pink.
Is This A Holiday? 