Thursday on the road

Thursday was another long day (55 miles), and one full of cool surprises. We blasted through Johnson City early in the morning and headed to the second of the "Tri-Cities," Bristol. There in the lee of the Bristol Motor Speedway the god of flats returned, and I spent the first of two days tending to Charlotte's rear wheel. In the middle of Bristol, TN we were tranformed riders in Bristol, Virginia, and we reveled in having made it to a new state. We scored a new state photo, then headed up the road we'll ride for many days, Route 11, here part of the old "Wilderness Trail." We hit the absolutle lovely town of Abingdon after lunch, and we explored the Barter Theatre, the handsome downtown, including a la-de-da shoppe where one can buy a sequinned
T-shirt reading "Don't Frown / Get Down!", which became our mantra for a bit. We headed out of town and up Route 19, the road that heads northwest into the mountains, for our stay at Riverside Campground. A long slow climb was rewarded by a very fast, long downhill to the
Holston River, a downhill that had each of smiling so hard we were giggling at the bottom.

In this crossroads called "Holston" we turned up River Road and headed up the North Fork of the Holston River (c.f. "Tears in the Holston River" by the elder Johnny Cash imo the death of Mother Maybelle Carter) for an absolutle exquisite ride in deep Virginina mountain land. The river on our right edge, Clinch Mountain beginning its knife rise several feet to our left, the road rising and falling only briefly with the run of the river and creeks from above, tunneled in shade and alone on the road, two abreast. We camped at the Riverside Campground, met some folks from the area who return each year, even a little eight year old who snookered some change from Charlotte in the game room in the barn behind the camp office. We slept on the river's edge, the night sounds punctuated by some insistent bullfrogs, and a couple of kids frog-gigging at night, unsuccessfully it seems, and, after one boy stove his toes against the fire ring outside our kids' little tent city, painfully. In the mountain river air, we slept like cordwood.

-PJClements