Day 147: Poole Knobs Campground, TN

With weather expected to move in this afternoon, we decided that I would ride a ways down the road before heading to Hendersonville to pick up Alea's bike at Biker's Choice.  I was spitting rain now and again, but generally pretty pleasant.  So I rode about 13 miles, then we piled in the van and doubled back toward the bike shop.  We did some shopping along the way, since we knew that we would be at the bike shop before the repairs would be complete.

We didn't have to wait long before the bike was ready, so we got going again pretty quickly.  But first we bought a couple of small top tube bags, so that I don't have to stuff my jersey so full of stuff, and so that Alea would have a more convenient place to store her wallet and phone.  

The one thing that I added to mine was a small piece of The Absorber, a synthetic chamois cloth.  When I'm riding in the rain, once I'm fully soaked it is about impossible to use my cell phone.  My wet hands get the screen wet, and if I try to wipe it off on my clothes it gets even worse.  So this way I can squeegee off the phone and my hands well enough to use the phone, and it is easy enough to wring out the chamois if it gets too wet.

Of course I hadn't done that before getting back on the road.  The frequency and intensity of rain showers increased slowly over the remaining 28 miles to our stopping point.  At one point, I had just stopped at the van for some Gatorade and had headed back out.  Then a microburst storm came through, dumping a lot of rain and some strong, gusty winds.  Alea had just passed me and had room to pull over on the shoulder, but she kept going.  Of course within a minute or two I could feel the water fill up my shoes, to the point where it started draining out by my ankles.  There was so much water on the road it was tough to know for sure where the pavement was, excepts for the ripples that were made as it flowed over the rumble strips.

Finally I came to where Alea had belatedly decided to pull over to wait for me.  I was completely soaked, but it was still better to wait out the remainder of the storm in the cab of the van than to keep slogging through the rain and wind.

So we are camped at Poole Knobs Campground, and we were lucky enough to camp for free tonight.  Someone had paid for our site for the night, but had to leave early for some reason.  Before leaving, they asked the volunteers in the registration hut to give it to someone that was only looking to stay one night.  That happened to be us.  So we have power, water and showers for free.  

We decided to use our windfall savings to order pizza.  Of course the fact that we are under a severe weather warning also had a lot to do with that.  It certainly wasn't turning out to be a night to be cooking outside.  

But luck wasn't with us.  The pizza driver was unable to follow the three big, brown signs between here and the highway that point to our campground.  So he got lost.  And he called three times to try to get himself sorted out.  But English was not his language of choice, so we couldn't help him understand where he went wrong.  And calling his boss at Roma Pizza and Pasta wasn't any help.  Of course the first thing we saw when we got to the campground was a Papa John's driver (it is located within a half mile of Roma) delivering a pizza here, so why was it so hard to find a public campground (hell, we've never been here before and it certainly wasn't any mystery to us)?  We'll never know what the malfunction was.  The owner told the driver to return to the barn to deliver the other pizzas that were stacking up, and we drove out to Pizza Hut to get a pizza to go...