Day 2: Smells Like Dead Possum

Fishermen woke me around five-thirty, loading their boats back into the river with no particular concern for who was sleeping nearby. With over seventy miles ahead of me for the day, I didn’t mind the early start — up, washed, tent packed, an energy bar chewed down on the move, and on the road by six. It was still dim enough that I pulled on the hi-viz jacket and turned myself into a walking highlighter pen. One guy in a bowling shirt, with a crooked eye and a Virginia accent that sounded like it belonged further south, caught me on the way out of the park and drawled, “Thaaat’s a reeeeeal nice biiiceeeeecle.”

Overcast, humid again, the hi-viz off within the hour. The first fifteen or twenty miles rolled easily through wooded roads with light traffic, interrupted only by two dead possums within a mile of each other — both, as tradition now demanded, photographed for the record. They stank regardless.

#1

#2

I stopped at a few country stores along the way for Gatorade and oatmeal banana bread, a habit I was rapidly losing control of. A Harley rider pulled in at one and we traded good-natured jabs about disc brakes and average speeds — he’d already covered a hundred miles and it wasn’t even eight. Further on I hit another detour, but I’d read ahead on another cyclist’s blog that the closure was for cars only, so I rode straight past the signs while everyone else turned around.

Love these.

By the fifty mile mark I’d worked through a burger and a corndog at a gas station — a petrol station, I’m aware — and the last third of the ride turned genuinely hard, tiredness compounding with Saturday traffic that had picked up considerably. Crossing the interstates felt like running a gauntlet, and I still can’t quite believe the official route takes you straight through Mechanicsville — busier than any stretch has a right to be, with surely a better way through that nobody had found yet. Somewhere around seventy miles, Ashland came into view, and I was running purely on the promise of a motel bed and something to hold me together for the night.

Funny sign

These signs saved me today.

Finding that motel turned into its own small ordeal. I’d pictured Ashland as a one-horse town, a main street with a motel and a fast-food joint or two, but it turned out to be a proper, busy little place with a railway running straight through the middle — trains, enormously long ones, rolling through every few minutes, and I have no idea how the locals live with it. I turned on my politest voice and asked a couple of old-timers for directions, and they pointed me toward England Street, a road heading out to the interstate. Then I saw it: motels lined up one after another, a Taco Bell, a KFC and a Long John Silver’s standing guard beside them. It looked, at that moment, exactly like heaven.

Looooooooooong train

I showered for the better part of half an hour, then ran a bath just to soothe my legs, and washed my riding clothes in it afterward — the dirt that came off them was genuinely alarming, but saddle sores don’t forgive laziness. A nap left me feeling almost human again. Tomorrow would be shorter, forty-five miles or so to the Mineral Fire Station. Sleep now.

Zonked