A Bitter Sweet Day....(George is writing this entry)
Today, We made it through to Kentucky (It feels great to get through the first state). Virginia is the longest state along the Transamerica trial as it is for the AT.
We had heard a lot of negative things about Eastern Kentucky, crazy dogs that chase down bikers and try to take a chunk out of them, horrible road surfaces, narrow and curvy roads with no shoulders, Giant Coal trucks.
......Well all of it is True.
Within the first ten miles I had my first dog attack, I did have pepper spray for such an emergency but really didn't want to use it. The first incident involved two viscous dogs, they were out for blood. I tried screaming at them and out pedaling them but it was on an uphill. One snapped at my leg but missed, the other one went around my front wheel (not a good thing for a biker). They got together and were about to make another attack at me when I had to blast them with pepper spray, they were only about 2-3 feet from me, thus it was a direct hit. It stopped them dead cold in their path. This happened several other times, but I was able to avoid using the pepper spray. One dog that looked like Chewy followed me for a while but I could tell it was a friendly dog, thus I pulled over and he stopped following me, I guess he just wanted to say hello. I can't understand why people train their dogs to be so aggressive and none of them had tags.
The roads are the worst I have ever seen, they are extremely narrow with potholes and debris everywhere and they were filled with hidden curves, a lot of them didn't even have guard rails and were along a cliff. Some roads were partially washed out with no protection around them. These are the roads I had to share with Coal trucks, these trucks are so wide, they barely fit on the road. It was just a riders nightmare, these trucks had a difficult time passing me as the roads were so narrow and twisty, I tried to pull off when I heard them but some time there was no place to pull off to other than going over a cliff. Several times they had to just follow me until I could find a place to pull over, actually I caused a traffic jam several times. But the worse of it was when I heard pickups and other smaller trucks coming fast behind me and hearing their breaks squeal just before they get to me. It was just horrible, it was plain suicide. Also, there were no other bikers out their. The School buses were the worst. They gave no room and seem to not even see me. This was the only day that I wished I wasn't out there. We drove a little further on the trail (when I was done riding) and found it to be the same kind a roads, rest of the way. For safety reasons, we decided to look for another route, but after much research, we could not find one. What we did find was the Kentucky has the highest accident rate more than double of any other state along the route and that most of those occur in Eastern Kentucky, we have heard of bikers renting vans and bypassing Eastern Kentucky. To this point, we have not skipped or taken any short cuts but for safety reason, we also have decided to bypass this section of Kentucky and pick it up in Berea Kentucky, 138 miles further. We heard it gets safer at that point. We figure to make up part of the difference we will go to Mammoth cave national park (its supposed to be really cool) and only 87 miles added to the route.
On the bright side, Kitty got to do an awesome hike at the Breaks Interstate Park.
We went from Haysi, VA to ? KY
Todays stats: 59 miles: start time 8:00, end time 2:30
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