Day 10

I fell asleep after watching a Lance Armstrong-marathon being aired on the Outdoor Life Network. Sure would be nice to ride a bike like Lance's, and actually it nearly felt like I had one that light on the ride to and from Uno's, because I'd taken off all but one of the bags. First time I'd done that since starting out, and it's a dangerous thing to do because it makes it awfully hard to put them back on again.

Since I was in a motel, I pretty much threw my stuff all across the room, unlike the orderly fashion in which I unpack when camping. So of course that made it take longer to get ready in the morning, even though I didn't have to pack up the tent. I rolled out the door around 9:15, and headed for the Smokies.

I took the very route I had planned on taking the night before. Just to see if I could do it after all? The idea was to take route 336 southeast and hit the Foothills Parkway, and then perhaps take US 129 across the southern edge of the park. Well, the foothills were enough for me. The road up to the Foothills Parkway turned out to be an 1800 foot climb. 10%-15% grade for almost the whole distance. Wow. I guess it was Labor Day, so I labored. Some interesting things happen on a climb like that. If you hit a patch of say, 7% grade, it nearly feels like a downhill. For much of the way, the bike was pulsing, because in the tiny slice of time between the main force of each pedal stroke, the bike would actually start to roll backwards down the hill before I could give it another shot pulling it up the hill. I stopped four or five times along the way, although that's almost as bad as not stopping at all. I tried to find the flattest areas to stop in, but they still weren't very flat. So starting up again involved a quick sprint of a few steps shoving the bike ahead of me, and then leaping aboard and trying to get my feet on the pedals before the bike fell over or started going backwards. Then I had to hope that the burst of energy required for the sprint left a bit of energy in my legs until I could get rolling again.

But eventually, I made it to the top, and that was cool. A guy with his kids in a pickup had stopped and asked if I wanted a lift up to the top. That was really nice of him, but I declined. Don't want to cheat, you know. I also saw a road racer cycling down, and he said "it's a long hill!" I wonder where he was coming from. Anyway, at the summit it turned out that the Foothills Parkway didn't actually intersect the road I was on, it passed over it. I contemplated hauling the bike up the side of the overpass, but decided there wasn't much point. As I was sitting under this overpass at the summit, I met a really nice guy who was going by on a motorcycle. He stopped and we chatted for a while. It turns out that he was very knowledgeable about the area, and even better, he was able to look at things from a non-motor-driven-cyclist's point of view. He made it sound like it would be really cool to go through the National Park, but I decided it just wasn't in the cards for me in this trip. And he let me know that my idea of taking US 129 east would just lead to more of the same that I'd already faced. I guess I had been hoping that there would be one big climb up one side of the mountains, and then one big descent down the other. But no, these mountains are very inefficient, and you have to go up, and down, and up, and down, and so on, to get across them. So he went on his way, and I rolled down the hill after him. When I got to US 129, I sat there thinking for a while, and decided to head back west. Well, at least I SAW the Smokies, and they even lived up to their name, being wreathed in clouds as I approached them. And it was cool to look back into the valley after I'd made that climb. Unfortunately my camera battery was dead (the switch had flipped on accidentally), so I couldn't get any pictures.

The motorcycle guy (Stan, I believe?) said that US 129 was a very popular route for motorcyclists, because it has 130-some turns (which is actually what a guy in Knoxville had said too). So even though I was going west along a lake/river, and the curvy mountain region was to the east, I still saw a ton of motorcycles out there. The ride west was pretty easy, and eventually I made it back to US 411 (the very route my motel was on) at Vonore. There I crossed the Little Tennessee, which is actually a very wide dammed river. So wide that the crossing on US 129 I was originally going for, and the crossing on US 411 are over thirty-two miles apart with nothing in between. The rest of the day was spent in a much less spectacular (but much less tiring) fashion on 411. Plenty of hills, but very easy ones after the climb in the morning, and straight the whole way.

I stopped in Etowah to stock up on groceries for the evening. It seems like I talked with a lot more people than usual today. I don't know if it was the holiday, or if people are just really friendly in the area, but it was cool. I was shooting for a campground around Delano, a bit south of Etowah, but I turned a bit too early, and ended up on a road that turned into gravel. I rode a bit down the gravel, which was a good idea, because I then saw a sign saying I'd entered the Cherokee Natinoal Forest. Good enough, I figured, so I went back in the woods a good ways and made my own campsite instead of backtracking and trying to find my way to one I'd have to pay for. Cooked a meal (rice with fresh mushrooms and a tomato), set up the tent, watched the sun set and the moon rise, planned tomorrow's route, wrote my journal entry, and went to sleep!