Day 78: The Road Less Traveled

A very interesting day, in many ways.  The theme at this year's Camp Inn Camp Outt was 'the road less traveled' from the poem by Robert Frost.  As we were tracing our Adventure Cycling route today, I couldn't help wonder how few RVs would ever be on most of the roads that we were traveling.  There were lots of twists and turns, rises and falls on very narrow roads.  The roads were exceptionally lightly traveled and virtually none are found on our Official Tennessee Highway Map.

I was contemplating all this while parked alongside the road, waiting for Alea to come pedaling by.  Since I was on a ridge top, I used our Spot mapping app to see where she happened to be at that particular moment.  That's when I figured out that I had missed a turn and was headed the wrong direction!  So I quickly fired up the van and set off in search of Alea, knowing that she'd soon be expecting a chance to refuel.

I got turned around looking at the map, and thought that Alea had already made the turn that I had missed.  I ended up getting quite far down the road before figuring out that wasn't the case, so I decided to double back.  While backing up to make a U-turn I saw a dishcloth waving at me in the side view mirror - I had just driven about 20 miles with the galley hatch wide open!  I thought to myself, "Great, the galley tables, our cutting board and half of our food is probably scattered behind me along those twisting country roads!"  But when I checked I couldn't see that anything was missing (amazingly), so I closed it up and rushed back to try to find Alea.

This time I made it to the base of a hill where I thought she should be appearing in short order.  I barely had wifi coverage, so the Spot app took forever to show her location.  I misread the map (too many Hall Creek Road segments and too hard to find Hillcrest Rd with the app), thinking she had missed a turn.  A local good Samaritan happened by and he sent me off to the west to search for her, probably just before Alea came flying down the hill.  I ended up doing a full loop back to where I had just departed, finally catching up with Alea a few miles further down the road.

To my surprise, she had one of our dish towels tied to her handlebar, which she had found on the corner of the original turn that I had missed.  When we both inspected the galley we also noticed that we were missing some of the grocery bags that we use as trash bags.  But everything else seemed to be accounted for.

The plan for this evening was to leave the bike route a bit south of Waverly, TN and stay at the Loretta Lynn Campground.  But when we got there it turned out they were hosting a big dirt bike event.  And while we could've squeezed in somewhere, it didn't appeal to us to be elbows-to-assholes with that many people.  So we kept driving until we got to I-40, where we are staying at the Buffalo, TN KOA ($34.95, power, water and showers), where we have a commanding view of I-40 with a serenade of big rigs that is only occasionally punctuated by the sound of an unmuffled Harley (aren't we lucky?).  We'd rather be camping just about anywhere else, but neither of us was in the mood to continue hunting campsites late on Saturday afternoon!

An interesting rock on Forks River Road, south of Waverly, TN.

So we've got a lot of backtracking to do to get back to the bike route, plus the forecast low for tomorrow morning is only 32 degrees, with a forecast high barely above 60.  It'll be Wednesday before the lows get back to the mid-40s and the highs are in the 70s.  With our sunny lakeside campsite this morning, the thermometer registered in the mid-40s when we finally we brave enough to venture outside.  If the high made it past 60 today, it was just barely.  Most of the day it hovered around 57 degrees.

Our KOA campsite on a sunny but cold morning.