68.34 miles 2635 ft elevation gain
Red River Gorge to Lexington, KY
Franklin here. Today was a Type B, high-energy type of day. When I say type B, I mean it was an easy-going and relaxing day. The day before we talked about shifting our schedule 30 mins earlier, but today we accidentally shifted it in the wrong direction by 30 minutes. Well, at least we got the amount of time right.
Kinda a controversial opinion, but I don’t like pancakes. Unless it's a savory pancake (for example cabbage pancake, kimchi pancake, or seaweed pancake), I tend to stay away from pancakes. But today we made pretty decent pancakes for breakfast. We added some honey, yogurt, and peanut butter on top. I tried to make my pancake savory by adding peanut butter, soy sauce, and bagel seasoning. It wasn’t too bad.
After breakfast, we left Lota.Rocks Campsite and started heading towards Lexington Kentucky. Maxwell led the way, and he carried an air horn with him to scare away any potentially aggressive dogs. These air horns are REALLY loud, after setting it off once, my ears were ringing. Sophia has a little horn as well, but it sounds more like a chew toy than an air horn. I think the noise might encourage the dogs to chase us more than it would scare them away.
It was a pretty nice day for riding. A heat wave just passed and the temperature was a nice 74 Fahrenheit as opposed to last week when the humidity and heat made it feel like 104 degrees. I think the cooler weather just made all of us feel so much more energized! During one of our breaks, we decided to see if we can kick the flowers off of the plants and also played a round of ninja instead of actually resting.
Maxwell took us to a church where we took a break where we did some handstands. We took another break later at another church where we had an insect photography session with 2 ladybugs, a firefly, and a beetle.
Today we also saw upwards of 10 different groups of motorcyclists on the road. Many of them were pretty friendly and wave at us! Sometimes they would do this thing where they lift their feet off the motorcycles and pretend to be biking. I thought it was a cute gesture. One group of motorcyclists, I kid you not, had like 100 vehicles in their group. They stopped all traffic at this one intersection for a good couple of minutes to let the entire biker gang pass. They were a bunch of burly dudes with cool mustaches. Maxwell was probably shaking his head because they weren’t wearing the appropriate motorcycling safety gear. They also had flags with them saying “STOP NF”, it seemed like they were biking to support this “STOP NF” movement. What movement could these burly motorcyclists be biking for? It turns out that they were trying to raise awareness for neurofibromatosis as part of the mission of the Children’s Tumor Foundation. Huh… I never would have guessed.
Anyways, while we were biking, our OP driver for the day, Mariela was being a busy bee. She restocked our pantry at Costco with important foods like dates, purchased and cooked sausages, refilled gas, dropped off all our luggage, and reorganized our pantry all before meeting us for lunch. We were at a park for lunch where there were some nice, wide open grassy fields. So I did what one does when they stumble upon nice fields, I tossed some frisbee! We also did some partner yoga too.
After lunch, we headed towards Lexington, the first major city we are passing through on our trip besides DC. The scenery slowly changed from rural farms to suburban homes. I never thought that I’d be so glad to be in the suburbs again. We biked past cookie-cutter houses that were perfectly spaced apart, all with their nicely groomed lawns. After so many days of biking through rural areas or on the shoulder of freeways, it was a nice change of pace to be biking through these quiet and peaceful neighborhoods that felt so familiar to the type of neighborhood that I grew up in. They just felt so…… residential. I thought it was a lovely ride until I rode past this driveway where a totaled car was oozing brownish liquid. The car was a stark contrast to the rest of the scenery. We biked a couple more blocks and we saw this larger man, frantically running as fast as a man his size could run with one of his hands holding his pants up. It seems like he was running away from the scene of the accident. I was wondering if it might have been a hit and run. And then I hear sirens and before long a group of police cars with their sirens blaring came rushing to the scene. I guess MIT Spokes was able to make it to the scene of the incident before the police did.
We eventually arrived at our destination. We were staying with two different families who were affiliated with Sophia’s church group. The guys and gals split up to stay at the different homes. Robert, Maxwell, and I stayed with our hosts, Tony and Lynda. They made us a delicious, homemade spaghetti and meatball dinner. We talked about Tony’s experiences doing missionary work in Russia and also his career in tech despite going to school for fine art. It was wonderful to get to talk to them and learn about their experiences.
Fun Facts
While we are not biking, some of us like to read. Simone and I have a small book club where we are reading books that the other has already read! We like to keep each other updated on where we are in the book.
Here are some of the books we are reading:
Franklin: "Mistborn: The Final Empire"
Simone: "The Three-Body Problem"
Sophia: “Dimestore” (a memoir of an Appalachian writer’s life)
Mariela: Something in Russian
Solution to Day 9 Crossword
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