Day 4 : Let the Hills (Mountains) Begin...

From Afton, VA to Lexington, VA - 56.9 miles

Story [in numbers]:

Time on bike: 6:30:04
Average speed: 8.6 mph
Max speed: 36.1 mph

Story [in words]:

this morning we woke up at 5 am at the cookie ladies house, along with our friends keith and kirk. we were on the bikes by 6 am.

the cookie ladies house is literally in the middle of a climb, and so as we began cycling, we were climbing. no doubt about it. we climbed and climbed until we reached the blue ridge parkway (a national park that is just barely wider than the road...and goes about 469 miles). it was a pretty serious climb, but it was well worth it to get up to the parkway. it was an amazingly beautiful ride. we climbed to 3400 ft at our highest point today.

the climbing was challenging, but all in all i felt like it was a success. the climbs seemed slow...but doable. i felt like we learned that we can do the climbs, and that was a concern that we both had. so it was good. i am also learning that climbing also means awesome downhills, and we did plenty of that as well.

we rode for a number of hours this morning with our new friends, and then mid-morning we decided to part ways as they stopped to get some sandwiches and we wanted to keep covering the miles. so we continued on. a ways further up the road, we had two older cyclist come up behind us. great local guys that were just out for a morning ride. cailyn called them rocky and crash. rocky because he was going to do a ride in the rockies in a couple of weeks. and crash, because he had broken his leg a couple of years ago in a crash. they were really cool guys. and they gave us some great info about a local place to grab lunch in vesuvius.

we got off the parkway above vesuvius, and the decent was epic to say the least. huge grades, and switchbacks. we had to stop twice to let our brakes cool down and make sure that the breaks didn't overheat. and when we got down to vesuvius, we did indeed find the restaurant that the guys had told us about. it was called girty's, and it was an awesome little place. the ladies that worked there were hometown as they come, and the food was killer! great stop to say the least! and to our surprise, as we were about to head out, our friends keith and kirk pulled in.

they were there for just a quick stop, and so we ended up leaving there together again. we had a great gentle downhill ride next to a beautiful stream all the way into lexington. it is a beautiful college town (vmi and william and lee). we stopped at a little ice cream shoppe called sweet things ice cream shoppe, as it was a place that my friend pervis stopped at on his trip.

we ended up deciding to just go ahead and stay here for the night. we really wanted to get more miles in, but it was after 4 before we got into town, and there was no where close to the route where we were going to be able to camp, and so we decided it would be best to just stay here with our friends keith and kirk. so we are at a super 8 motel (with the cost split between us, it was not bad at all)...and so hopefully it will provide a great nights sleep...and we will again get on the bikes by 6 and try to cover a solid number of miles tomorrow. it would be awesome to get to christiansburg by tomorrow. if we could do that, we would complete the first of our 12 maps, which seems like it would be a great confidence boost.




8.6
36.1
6:30:04
56.9