Appalachians in KY

Monday 11/21/11 Hazard, KY

We left Berea on a Saturday when the weather was good, sunny and DRY.
We pedaled long and hard to make it to Booneville where we knew of a Church that was kind to cyclists.
What we didn't know was that most of the cyclists camp outside in the back.
We however were able to talk the pastor into allowing us to sleep inside where there were gas heaters and a bathroom.
After waking up around 6:30am to be out of the church by 8, we went to the local cafe where we had coffee and biscuits and gravy. The biscuits came on the plate with a bowl of the gravy next to it.
We had never seen B&G served in this manor. 1st, there wasn't any sausage in the gravy! Even the Yankees in the north put sausage in the gravy.
As we set off for a grueling day of climbing the Appalachians, the trailer broke and Vesper had to rig it so that it will stay connected to the bike. All was good as we set off. Not 30 minutes into our ride, it began to rain and rain hard. we were soaked in 5 minutes.
We were faced with tackling 3 very large hills on our way towards Hazard. We were excited to get to Hazard because we knew that we had a warm place to retreat to when we got there.
The three hills were massive, but Vesper felt as if he was in the tour de France! Some kids that were playing outside were cheering him on and yelling about the cute dog he was pulling. Also, someone in a truck shoot silly string at him as the drove by with a "WooHoo"
The hills were fun for him but torture for me.
When we finally made it to Hazard, our CouchSurffer host that we had lined up the following day had not contacted us yet. It was getting dark and we were sitting at a McDonalds trying to use the "free" wi-fi for better reception. We decided to try to contact another possible host here in Hazard from couchsurffers.org.
Stephen and Ellen with an emergency couch plea.
They responded and were gracious enough to have us for the night.
Stephen was good enough to give us a ride to Enterprise so that we may rent a car and head towards Powhatan, VA to the Noorwood Plantation.
http://norwoodplantation.com/
We will be leaving today to spend Thanksgiving with my cousins Ted and Connie Harris as well as Kennon.
We look forward to visiting with the VA Kennons and spending some time in history.

We will come back to the Appalachians to finish out trek across the USA to D.C. after Thanksgiving.

Happy thanksgiving to all that follow our blog!
Thanks for reading,
WOS and Vesper