Trish & Phill's Tandem TransAmerican

Tour 2003 

May 19 Kentucky - Berea

Last night we said good-bye to Larry and welcomed in our new tour leader Brian.

Larry passing over to Brian

 Adventure cycling will have three leaders on this tour.  Larry will return to Missoula in Montana.

We have to drop the van off further along the trail so we offer to carry anything along to the next camp ground for the group. When we break camp there is often some food left over that we give or throw away, this morning we seem to have a fair amount left over so we can deliver it to the next camp along with other stuff given us to make the load lighter.

I can honestly same I don't envy the guys today. Slight rain again but the hills WOW !

They will stay at the Elk Horn Methodist Bikers Hostel - some sort of record for the longest place name we stayed at I would bet . It was a really nice clean place with good kitchen facilities but no shower. I took the time to read some of the comments from the previous cyclists in the visitors book, all commented on the 4 mile hill they just completed riding up to reach the hostel.

So we climbed into the nice seat of the van and drove off. We will drive to Berea tonight and will follow the route that our ride would have taken us. In all we will skip nearly 200 miles using this van. Your probably wondering why we didn't drop of the van at a closer town, unfortunately there are only certain places you can drop of the van and Berea was it. Even though we didn't want to have it for so long we had no choice.

We passed from West Virginia to Kentucky almost without notice, just a small sign post but to us it was a huge milestone. Again hills abound and still the scenery is beautiful.

State Line                                                                        Just inside Kentucky Border (Breaks)

Once we were a few miles inside the Kentucky border the change was very obvious. The lack of public spending on the roads, the litter at the side of the roads, the amount of trailer homes all told us that Kentucky is a lot poorer than Virginia.

We passed a place called "Poor Bottom" a small community at the base of a hill and man was it poor. The roads were no better than third world country. To deal with the amount of rain they get 40 inch pipes lay across the road and the roadway pavement ran across them. either side of these water ways was a sharp drop off, often the roads are broken and only single lane.

It was not far from this area that the hills people continued to have feuds for years. Families would often be fighting each other for years, the most infamous being the McCoy's and the Hatfield's.

After setting off at 8.30am this morning we arrived in Berea about 8.00 PM and stayed in a Motel.     

Page owned & maintained by Trish Collins email to  trishphill@aapt.net.au.  Last Updated 28/07/2003