Friday, June 24th:

This morning, due to the time change, we slept in until 4:45, then hopped on our bikes around 6:00. Today we are going to Middlesboro, which is right on the border of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. This is also the home city of the Cumberland Gap, which we will be passing tomorrow in the early morning.  Last night, when planning the route, the original route was 103 miles- just taking Highway 92 most of the way. However, after changing our plan to some less-traveled roads, we cut the mileage for today all the way down to 88.9 miles. You can bet that that made everyone happy! J We started out heading east on Highway 92 going towards Stearns, KY. 20 miles down the road, we stopped for a break- and Ed went to the back of the Tahoe to get some Donuts that he had bought yesterday evening- but to his surprise- they were all gone! Everyone had eaten one this morning, leaving 20 left in the bag- however, what he didn’t know was that Christian had a sweet tooth this morning and had eaten ALL OF THEM! This led to some “colorful speech” on Ed’s part- and some laughing on everyone else’s. After our break- we continued up the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky, just near the border of Tennessee. At one point, we had to climb 700 feet over a span of a seven tenths of a mile. Doing some calculations with right triangles- that means that we rose 700 feet over a hypotenuse of 3696 feet. So the sine of the angle of elevation is equal to 700/3696 or 175/924 which is approximately .1894. And by taking the inverse sine, we are left with an angle of 19 degrees! At our 40 mile break, we talked to a guy who owned quite a bit of land in the Appalachian Mountains, and he told us that there were plenty of hills to come, which did not make us happy- but we trudged on through the country roads until our turn off came. We turned onto Paint Creek Road, just to find out that it was unpaved a few tenths of a mile down- so we had to plan a new route to get to Middlesboro. We stayed on Highway 92 which took us into Williamsburg where we grabbed some lunch at Burger King at 53 miles. With this new route, we had about 51 miles to go to get to Middlesboro- so we set off. I went to the store really quickly and met up with the bikers 10 miles down the road- over a couple huge hills. At our 75 mile break- Christian told us that the last thing that he wanted to do in the world was to get back on his bike. Nonetheless, he did with the rest of the group and they set off again. It was hovering at 85 degrees, which when on a bike, is a deadly heat. But these guys dogged it to 95 miles where we had our final break and then went into the Holiday Inn hotel in Middlesboro for a good night’s rest.