Day 80 Vesuvius to Charlottesville

This is the day we have all been waiting for! We grabbed a good hearty breakfast at Gertie's Cafe and headed up the hill!! It was pretty darn steep and for about 4 miles we were climbing up and up and up. Seeing some fellow cyclists flying down what we were were slowly climbing, was a bit distracting. The ride was beautiful but tough. Each pedal was a conscious effort especially with only two rings on my bike.

We all made it within the hour and reached the Blue Ridge Parkway which was absolutely gorgeous, lush green foliage lined the parkway on either side of us with valleys and forests glowed in the distance as far as we could see. We stopped at a few overlooks and at one particular one, we met Leo who was having some major problems with his bike. He was headed West to Oregon and we gave him some advice, wished him the best of luck, and as we were leaving we saw a huge black snake slithering into the bush, I screamed! We stopped in Afton, Virginia, another place we had been reccommended to go and planned on having lunch there.

Thats when we met June, the Cookie Lady. She has resided in Afton for most of her life and has been catering to cyclists since the bicentennial in 76. She originally found many cyclists coming through her small town and offered water to them out of her hose. She then dedicated her side house, known as the bike house, to all passing through cyclists. It is a shrine to bicycles, cyclists, their stories, memorabilia and everything else you could possibly imagine about bikes. Over 14,000 cyclists have signed the guestbook, got their pictures taken, and have slept under the bike house roof. It is a truly amazing sight! We were all in shock and just kept wandering around the place, there were about four rooms and you couldn't even see the walls..they were covered in post cards, and newspaper clippings from the years past. We visited with her for a long time, listening to her telling us stories of all the cyclists from over the years. She offered us cookies of course and we ate a lot of them! We said our goodbyes and got our photos taken and headed on our way to Charlottesville.

We didn't exactly know where we were going to stay and somehow arrived at the conclusion of camping out at a church on their back lawn. We originally were thinking of staying at a fraternity house however, after inquiring with a few we weren't exactly 100% they wanted 5 bikers there, especially four men in spandex, i probably would have been fine on my own ha! So we went across the street to the church, everything always works out you know! We took hose showers and grabbed some dinner at a local restaurant in town. We slept under the stars and prepared for a 94 mile day!~

Kristen