Day 6

I haven't had anything close to a bad day yet (I'm sure they'll come), but today was easily the best day of the trip so far.

It started up normally, which means that my stealth campsite wasn't discovered at night. Really the only difference in getting up in the morning was that I didn't have to walk any sort of distance to find a bathroom. Surprisingly, it was the first night that I hadn't showered before going to bed, but even that wasn't a big deal. I had to shove the bike through a bunch of undergrowth to get it back out to the road, but beyond that path of destruction all I left behind was a matted down patch of grass where my tent had sat. So overall, the free camping was a pretty good experience.

The first half of the day was fairly normal. US 60 towards Frankfort, cut down KY 151/US 127 to Lawrenceburg, turn east on US 62 to Versailles. Kentucky, unlike Indiana, likes rumble strips (grooves cut into the shoulder so the drunks know when they're about to die). Thankfully, they're done well and haven't been an issue so far. They're only about a foot wide, so if the shoulder is large, there's plenty of room to ride to the right of them. If the shoulder is narrow, it's not a road with much traffic, and usually vegetation covers some of the shoulder so I'd be riding on the main portion of the road anyhow.

Between Lawrenceburg and Versailles, US 62 crosses the Kentucky River in spectacular fashion. The bridge stretches high above the deep river gorge, with a railroad bridge spanning the gap even higher up, and distilleries in the surrounding hills. I haven't found a lot of things to take photos of, but that was definitely worthy of a few pictures. It's also nice that I can pull my bike off to the side and stop, which you could never do with a car.

Shortly before reaching Versailles, I stopped at a huge (but empty) recreation area with baseball fields everywhere. Found a picnic shelter with power and a bathroom to use while I aired out my tent that was still wet from the morning. Since that was a fairly long break, I made lunch go quickly in Versailles. Then I continued on to Lexington, where US 60 became a fairly big highway, another one of those that's really safe because of the huge shoulder, but just not all that pleasant to ride on. I took that right to the heart of downtown Lexington, which is big enough to have a few tall buildings.

I made a stop in the library, which was a pretty nice 4-story affair with one of those giant swinging pendulum clocks hanging down the center. After looking up a few things, I sat down and flipped open the computer, and would you look at that, I've got a network connection! Isn't wi-fi great? So I spent about an hour there doing things with my high-speed connection that I can't do with the cell-phone modem, like uploading some pictures in the photos directory. I took US 25 south out of Lexington, and it was a standard suburban artery during rush-hour, by far the most traffic I'd seen in days. Thankfully I'm quite used to riding in that stuff.

Then I turned off down KY 418. After passing through the tiny town of Athens, I discovered the most beautiful road I've been on for the whole trip, and possibly the best I've ever been on. It's a ten-mile ribbon of asphalt, brand-new, but still just wide enough for two cars to pass side by side, and winding up, down, left, and right with the land. Hard up against the edges was either forest, or the rolling hills of horse farms. There was hardly any traffic, and the closeness of the vegetation and fences to the side of the road made it a very intimate experience. With the sun lowering behind me and towering white clouds dotting the sky, it was exactly the kind of scene I'd been hoping to discover on this trip. And yes, there were hills. Two river-valley crossings, each almost as deep as the Ohio crossing, and then a final drop that brought me to the Kentucky again, this time alongside it down in the gorge, with the hills rising up sharply to either side. I wasn't the only cyclist enjoying the ride today either, because coming the other direction I saw a road-racer, and then amazingly, another fully-loaded tourist! He was flying down the hill that I was crawling up, so he didn't stop to chat but he hoisted his water bottle high over his head in salute.

I'm now at Fort Boonsborough State Park. The RV area is quite large, completely full, and packed really densely, but there is tons of room in the primitive area and I selected a nice site well out of the way. I think there are four groups occupying primitive sites here; that equivalent area in the RV section is filled by at least 40 campers, probably more. There was a washer and dryer here, and since I got in plenty early, I cooked dinner, showered, and did laundry. Yep, it was a good day.