Day 18

It's been a while since I've put up a big number like this. I think I know why: it takes all day to do it! I was up pretty early again, and out on the road by 7:30. It was all the way down to 64 degrees this morning. First I had to backtrack a bit, back south down AL 227 so that I could cross Guntersville Lake. Of course, before I could even do that, I had to climb and descend a 500 foot hill. AL 69 then crosses the lake over a perfectly flat and straight mile-and-a-half-long causeway. Every quarter mile, with complete regularity, I would see a giant heron launch itself from the rocks on the side of the road and go skimming out over the lake. They always flew off just before I my bicycle reached them, and it totally made me feel like I playing a side-scrolling video game.

After the lake there were a couple more big hills to climb, but after that it seemed like one of the flattest days I've had in a long time. So that climbing figure might be wrong again, but maybe not, because of the distance. At about 40 miles I hit AL 67 which took me northwest, and it was definitely the flattest and straightest road I've been on since Indiana. In fact, much of the route today didn't seem much different than Indiana. I've always figured Alabama was a true "Southern" state, but you don't really get that feel in the northern part.

I grabbed lunch at a Subway in Priceville (it's really quite amazing how many Subways there are out there), and then passed through Decatur on US 31. Decatur is the biggest city I've been through since Atlanta, and by the looks of it might be the biggest city I see until I hit St. Louis. I stopped at the library there, and they had a wireless access point, but I couldn't get Internet access through it. US 31 was pretty annoying, as there was a lot of traffic going really fast and no real shoulder. I crossed the Tennessee River for the second time of the day; down here when the river gets wide they call it a "lake", so Lake Guntersville and Lake Wheeler are really just wide parts of the Tennessee River.

I got off US 31 by turning west on Tanner Rd., and about a mile later, my front tire went flat. Quite amazingly, it's the first flat I've gotten since Chicago. It would have been nice if I would have gotten it on a day I planned to go 60 miles instead of 95, but I guess I shouldn't complain. So, I found some shade, sat down and fixed it. No big deal. Hopped back on the bike, started pedalling, and I couldn't get out of the highest gear on the rear wheel. I looked at the shifter and saw that somehow the Avid Rollamajig (which is a little part I added to the shifter cable to allow it to bend around the handlebar bag) had split in half. Luckily it appears that it was designed to do so, although I took me a while to figure out how to repair it. Eventually I got it done though, hopped back on the bike, started pedalling, and I couldn't get out of the highest gear on the rear wheel. So I pulled off the road for a third time. After investigating for a while, I found that the head of the shifter cable's inner wire had somehow popped out of its socket inside the shifter. It probably took about 10 frustrating minutes of prying with various tools until I could push the head out through the shifter. Then I had to pull the whole wire out, re-thread it through the socket, and hook everything back up again. Hopped back on the bike, started pedalling, and finally everything seemed to work. I'm not really sure why the shifting mechanism suddenly exploded when I got a flat, but all I can figure is that the handlebars turned hard when I had the bike propped up and somehow something got yanked the wrong way.

It was getting late, and I still had about 25 more miles to go, so I was pushing pretty hard for a while on some not-too-smooth country roads. Oh, and apparently to help prove my point about Georgia being a rare safe zone for dog-chasings, at least 8 or 9 dogs decided to chase me today. At one point I thought I heard a huge one coming up out of some trees on the side of the road, but it turned out to be a horse, who then ran with me for the length of his pasture. So that was kinda cool.

Eventually I made it onto US 72, and headed west on the most immaculate, smoothest strip of asphalt I've been on the whole trip. It's the kind of road that seems to pull your tires along, making them rotate all by themselves. So it was quite a surprise when my front tire suddenly went flat again. Argh! Front tire flats on a loaded bike are no fun at all, because as the tire goes, so does steering control. But I managed to safely stop and pull off the road and get a look at it. I'd used a quick patch (essentially just a glorified adhesive sticker) to fix the tube, on the rationale that I'd used the same solution on my last flat and it's held perfectly fine for over 1000 miles. Well, this one lasted about 10. So now I just put in a new tube. Still had to hop on and off the bike again a few times to re-connect the front brake, adjust a rubbing fender, and adjust the magnet for the bike computer.

So with the sun getting low in the sky, I finally rolled into Rogersville, gateway to Joe Wheeler State Park. I spotted some Golden Arches, and they they were really calling to me at this point, so McDonald's it was. They won't stay in business very long if they get too many people like me buying three $1 double cheeseburgers (with large fries and a thrice-refilled Coke). I scarfed all that down much too quickly, and then rode the final 2.5 miles to the state park campground, arriving around 7:30. The registration station was closed, so I found a primitive site, set up, and showered, and then it was dark. While I was typing this, the ranger came by and told me I had to go back to the office to register. After I said "I have to go all the way back there?" in my best "I've-ridden-96-miles-with-lots-of-mechanical-difficulties-and-it's-pitch-black-out" voice, he was nice enough to drive me there and back. The campground is surprisingly full. Well, probably only about half the sites are occupied, but that's far more than I've seen at any other post-Labor Day campground (there were two other sites occupied in the place last night). Most amazingly, there are three other tenters here in the primitive section! Hopefully those guys over there don't play their music all night long.