101 Miles in one day, but not by us!

October 26, 2007: Day 7

Today’s Mileage 36.0; Average speed 9.2 mph; Total Trip Distance: 183.5; 3.5 miles from Virginia.

Cimarron is happy tonight as he says, “We’ve been in this state long enough. I want some good roads!”

We left Pikeville after another good breakfast at the Huddle House. During breakfast Cimarron picked up a brochure entitled “The Pikeville Cut-Through Project.” What a project! Pikeville like many a town was built in a poor location. It’s on the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. The Levisa makes a horseshoe bend around Peach Orchard Mountain and Pikeville is along the river in the flood plain. So, low and behold, the town periodically floods. Who would have guessed it? At the heel of the horseshoe the river was only ¾ of a mile from itself but the mountain intervened. So in 1973 they moved the mountain! Because unsightly rail traffic, a flood prone river, and too many cars on the four-lane Route 460 were coming through town, moving the mountain allowed the river, the highway and the railroad to bypass the town. The project was rather magnanimous in that 18 million cubic yards of earth were moved from the mountain cut-through for the new RRRR (River, Road, and Railroad Route) and the entire abandoned riverbed was filled to create 400 acres of usable land, which was suitably named after Mayor Hambley who came up with the idea. The New York Times called it the “eighth wonder of the world.” The brochure concludes as follows: “The Cut-Through Project has freed Pikeville from the floods, dust and other restrictions that plague so many other Eastern Kentucky counties. The net result is a very livable town…” The cost was just $80 Million. Isn’t that lovely.

Finding our stopping point of yesterday was no easy task on the 37-mile drive from the hotel in Pikeville to the town of Bypro. We got five miles too far down Route 122 and only when we saw a beautiful high school football stadium we had never seen before did we know we were lost. We finally pulled up in Bypro opposite the dilapidated shack of a hardware store. My mirror bracket was cracked and the mirror would not hold adjustment so I went over to the hardware where the owner gave me a two inch piece of duck tape and some silicone spray lubricant for the bike chain which showed some rust after all the grit, grime, rain, and Phillip Newsome’s high pressure spray cleaning. There are nothing but nice people in Kentucky. The fellow said, “You ridin’ that cross country bike route?” When I said yes, he said, “good luck up old Abner Mountain down there in a few miles. I don’t even like to go over that in my truck and most of the coal trucks can’t make it up and over. It’ll be a two or three mile walk if you make it!” It just sounded like the rest of Kentucky to us, and off I went towards Abner Mountain on Route 122.

The mountain was all it was advertised with more than two miles of walking and bike pushing. There were no shoulders and many sharp steep switchbacks. Again all the drivers were courteous. They could not drive more than 20 mph in either direction. The downhill was for over two miles and I was able to go up to 20 mph and keep ahead of the cars that couldn’t go any faster than me. The bike probably would have run out to 40 or 50 mph if the curves weren’t so sharp. I sweated heavily on my push up to the top so I put on my rain jacket for wind blockage on the decent. At the first country food store downhill I met Heather (who pronounced it Hather) who is 31 years old and has a twelve-year-old son. She is divorced from her car salesman husband and indicted all salesmen saying, “He like all salesman was a womanizer, and treated me badly when I got fat, and telling me I was too fat to find anyone else. So I found a 51 year old who treats me right, and not just for the sex!” All you have to do is walk in and they tell you all this stuff. They didn’t have any cappuccino and not even any coffee! So I had a bag of M & M Peanuts and was on my way bidding Hather goodbye and wishing her luck with her new beau.

At the bottom of the hill the Trail Boss was sitting next to a gas station and I shouted, “Do they have any coffee?” And he shouted back, “No.” So I kept on going for another couple miles where I stopped at a country store and was told to go another mile for coffee. I found a very nice store with a Hunt’s Pizza Franchise and got two slices of Pizza and a cup of cappuccino. They said the Hunt’s franchise is cheap and the quality way beyond anything they could produce. They sell 200 Pizza’s per week. The Trail Boss went by and missed a turn and me, and I didn’t see him again for an hour or more. While I sat sweating out front on the ground eating my pizza a school math teacher in her pajamas walked up to order 6 pizzas for her fifth grade class. She said to the total stranger sitting there (me), “Excuse me for being in my pajamas but it is “pajama day” at Virgie elementary school, and I came to get the pizza.” I said, “I prefer women in night gowns, but pajamas will do.” I think she was happy the biker wasn’t offended and wished me a safe trip and goodbye when she left. Is this a great country, or what!

Then down the road a mile or so on Route 1469 the Virgie Middle School kids were picking up roadside trash. There were about 50 kids all over the side of the road and off into the grass and weeds wearing latex gloves and placing garbage bags of trash all along the road. There were no warning signs, no flagmen, and no police escorts. About half the kids had orange vests and the rest did not. They all waved and shouted at me. There appeared to be just one supervising adult for about each twenty kids. As I took a picture one of the kids waved and the supervising person herded her back with the rest of the kids as though she thought I might kidnap the kid on the bike. When I said, “You need a few signs, flagmen, and a police escort.” She said, “We’re okay, we have a bus driver.” They do this activity once a year. It must be in conjunction with pajama day at the elementary school.

I soon had to walk over Buckingham Mountain another couple of very steep up hill miles. The Trail Boss came by at a very inopportune time on a major steep switchback and shouted something about how great the van was running but these mountains might be killing his transmission. My transmission wasn’t doing so hot either, and I don’t mean the bike.

Soon we were out on to Route 23, an expressway for about 4 miles. Cimarron was sitting at the turnoff to Route 611 to Lookout. He had bought instant Cappuccino and had made me a hot cup. What a Trail Boss he is. His dedication and friendship to me are immeasurable. We are having a good time and he is beginning to get back into the Trail Boss mentality. There was a car parked with a flea market sale going on. I checked it out, but I didn’t see anything I needed. Cimarron didn’t even look but pointed out they smoked more cigarettes per hour than they could possibly pay for out of sales!

As I sat sipping the Cappuccino I saw another bike rider coming up Route 23 at least three times as fast as I did. I waved for him to come over and never moved off my seat. It was not a Trans- Am rider but Steven Childers an 18-year-old freshman at Union University in Middlesboro, KY, where he is on a full scholarship for bike racing. He says the tuition is $21,000 a year and he has a full ride! (No pun intended!) Recently he came in second in the nationals of college bike road racing even against Stanford, Florida State and some other big schools. The kid is a star. He lives just half a mile up the road from where we saw him and had just completed a 101-mile circuit ride in less than half a day! I had been out longer than he and was just now pushing 22 miles. The kid did say they had us on the very tough cross-mountain routes and he could route us a faster although longer way. Steven said he was a good off road motorcycle racer in junior high school and saw Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France two years ago and said, “Maybe I can ride a bike and get to go to college on a scholarship.” So he took up cycling two years ago and is now runner up national champion!

Soon we were going up another walking climb on route 611. I walked another couple of miles pushing to the nearly 2000-foot elevation top. Then we went down the worst road of the whole trip route 611 through Lookout. My friend Cindy Miller (Mrs. Gorp of hiking fame) rode across country on her bike last year and then rode back. She was with her friend Stumpknocker. Once they rode 70 miles in Colorado and the hotel was non-existent so they rode 49 more miles to the next place—all in one day! Well, Mrs. Gorp wanted us to look for the house she saw last year sitting in the middle of the road in Lookout after having slid off the mountainside in torrential rains. Well Cindy, the house has been moved, but the slide evidence is still present although smoothed off and replanted. I think you can buy the property cheap if you want it! This road was only one lane wide and had a stream close to the right edge that eroded under the pavement so in some spots the pavement had caved in. There were many shacks and trailers. We wondered how the trailers were ever brought up the mountain to these spots.

I came off Lookout Mountain and Route 611’s terrible road and turned onto Route 197 towards Elkhorn City, the last town in Kentucky. The Elkhorn River flows to Elkhorn city through a deep valley between the nearly 2000-foot hills. I left Cimarron the Trail Boss on top of the mountain calling motels and told him to meet me along the road to Elkhorn City as it was getting near dark. He said to just stop at Ashcamp, 7 miles short of Elkhorn City, but I said, “No, I’ll stop when I see the whites of your eyes.” Well when I hit Route 197 it was a well-paved and smooth road and for the first time on this trip ran level or slightly downhill all the way. So I pedaled in the second front Cog and sometimes the highest rear gear and had the speedometer up to 23 mph as I cruised the entire 7 miles to Elkhorn city in about 20 minutes. This was the fastest 7 miles of my life.

Well, my hand typed spreadsheet directions for the Trail Boss neglected to tell him which way to turn on Route 157 and he went the wrong way. When he figured it out and came north he couldn’t believe he didn’t see me in a few miles so he went south again. Finally he figured the route was north and came into town just at dark to find me standing in front of the only restaurant. He was quite frustrated and said, “don’t go so damn fast at quitting time!”

After toweling off and putting on a dry fleece sweatshirt and loading up the frisky stallion, we went into the restaurant and had a fine dinner. I had a hot roast beef sandwich, green beans and mashed potatoes and a big piece of cream pie and three 20-ounce cups of diet coke. There were two sheriff deputies seated at the restaurant and I talked to them about the recent two-dozen drug arrests in this Pike County yesterday. They took part in the raids and said most of the problem is prescription drug abuse and mostly oxyconton (a highly addictive narcotic found in brands like Tylox, Lortab, and Vicodan). The cops said most of the drugs come from massive prescriptions that doctors in other states write for a fee of $200. The drug dealers travel to get the prescriptions and then sell each pill for about $100! Since I am a doctor, and stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, I don’t know how (or why) any doctor would write such a prescription, or get away with it, and how any pharmacist would fill it. All the doctors I know have so much meaningful and legitimate work serving good patients that they would never get into this business and the low life people involved. Then one of the officers sat down with us and pointed out the father of the police undercover officer who has infiltrated the local drug business! One learns a lot when riding a bike!

At the hotel we learned our Hiking Friend Pirate has stayed here and is a friend of the owners. The owner has a CB handle nickname of “Sweet Pea” and when Pirate heard that he said, “I have a hiking friend named Sweet Pea.” That hiking friend of Pirate’s is my wife Millie. We hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in the year 2000 and met Pirate many times along the way.

Tomorrow we cross into Virginia after 3.5 more miles. The Trail Boss is excited about getting near the Appalachian Trail and the famed AT town of Damascus, Virginia, some 80 mile away. If we could get the same road as Route 157 we’d be in Damascus tomorrow. We’re psyched.