Troutville, VA to Christiansburg, VA
64 miles
It’s hard to believe one simple word can nearly bring you to your knees, but “just” nearly did that today. Our route took us through the rolling farmland of the Catawba Valley. Cows, horses, goats, and acres of hay fields populated the landscape. Stunning. We keep waiting for the scenery to turn from picturesque to dull, or at least commonplace, but the landscape continues to awe. Gorgeous geography, not a lot of manscape, though. In the heat we can barely carry enough water with us. Our afternoon 40-plus miles were the toughest cycling yet; the steep roller-coaster grades of the Appalachians took the starch out of us. We’d prefer to climb an 8,000-foot western pass any day over these relentless up and downs, even if at the end of the day the total is only 4,000 feet elevation gain. You huff and puff to the top of a 15% grade, speed down the other side in 30 seconds, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. So when the one general store was Sunday shuttered and a passerby suggested a store JUST down the road on the right, we clambered onto our bikes with the mantra,Cold Drink! Cold Drink!, re-energizing us. We rode on and on in search of the phantom store, eventually realizing once again we’d been fooled by “just”. “Just” draws a line in the sand between motorist perspective and biker perspective. Just around the corner… Just down the road aways…We gave up on that search after a couple of miles off-route, even though it probably was just a little further. Didn’t pass another store until 2 hours later and finally got that cold drink. In the meantime, we were saved by the church spigot.
We didn’t make it into Christiansburg until 7:30 pm or so, riding in with the fireflies. Thinking we were being very clever, we spied what seemed like an obvious shortcut on the map. And as most “shortcuts” turn out to be, it was a no-chance-of-cycling-up-it, barely-push-our-bikes-up, very, very steep ½ mile hill. Half way up the hill, to further humiliate us, the skies let loose with a torrent of rain that soaked us through. As a fitting ending to the day, we then had to cycle an additional 4 miles down a 4-lane commercial road to reach a motel. But we made it, and celebrated with a big outing to the Ruby Tuesday’s next door to reacquaint ourselves with vegetables at the salad bar.
Sorry there’s not much in the way of pictures. We were too tired to stop for anything that didn’t involve cold drinks.
Note to neighbors: We wired money to Rascal and he’s on his way home for his appointments. No more adventures for him. He’s listed as one of Seattle’s longest lived rabbits and we might get big prize money from the American House Rabbit Society. Plus Animal Planet called for an interview. Thanks for keeping him going!
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