Day 82: Florence, AL

The weather is once again awesome!  The lows were in the upper 40s and quickly warmed into the mid-50s.  It was cool riding in the shade at first, but the temperature gradually warmed into the mid-70s, which is about as good as it gets for me.  And we should have more of the same for the next couple of days.

The terrain has also gotten easier - low rollers that seem to be flattening out as we get farther south.  And traffic on the Parkway has been very light thus far.

We are enjoying traveling along the Parkway, but at our speed it is easy to glance to the side and see brief glimpses of the nearby rural life that is hidden behind the curtain of trees.  It makes us wonder what we might be missing?  Certainly there is less interaction with locals (of which we see virtually none).  But at the same time, we are grateful to be separated from commercial truck traffic, and we don't see nearly as many rental RVs now as we do in the summer.  With all the interpretive sites, it is super easy for Alea to find leapfrogging stops, making this a very stress-free section of our travels.  We're even considering using the Parkway as our means of returning to the Midwest in the spring (we wouldn't consider doing so in the summer, when there is much more RV traffic), instead of using Adventure Cycling's Underground Railroad route (which overlaps some portions of routes that we've been cycling lately).  We're also considering bypassing Louisiana this trip and finding our own route across part of southern Mississippi once we reach Natchez.  There is a good chance that in a year's time we could be traversing parts of the Southern Tier route three different times (across Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and part of Louisiana), so we're looking for ways to minimize the number of segments that we'll need to repeat.

I rode 45 miles to the Tennessee-Alabama state line yesterday.  Since there aren't a lot of camping opportunities on the Trace (the next campground was 35 miles farther down the road), I piled the bike into the van and we drove southeast to Florence, AL where we are camping at McFarland Park ($24, full hookups and showers).  It is situated on Pickwick Lake, a dammed portion of the Tennessee River.  The sites are a bit too close together for our liking, but the park isn't full, so we have a reasonable amount of privacy.  Plus we are in a fair sized city, so we were able to find good pizza for dinner last night.

Readin' and ridin'.

Lunch break at site of McGlamery's Stand.
What is that mysterious object in the upper left corner? ;-)

We are definitely finding that 35-45 miles is an optimal distance for either of us to travel in a day.  Anything beyond 45 miles and the enjoyment of the riding diminishes more quickly with each additional mile (unless we are lucky enough to have had one hell of a tailwind).  So that's the daily mileage target that we'll be shooting for during the remainder of this year's travels.  Next year, during the longer summer days, at times we'll both ride in order to cover 70-90 miles when it makes sense to do so.