Day 53, July 19

Buckhorn to Hindman, KY
53 miles

Happy Birthday to my wonderful wife who lets me do silly things like this trip, while she stays at home with our boys.

The day started off with a steep series of hills. The humidity hade sweating quite a bit.  There were often rock walls on one side of the road or the other, which just made it hotter due to the heat reflecting off of them.

Somewhere near the town of Chavies there was a town called Krypton. It was so small that it did not even appear on my map. In addition to the lodge there was a "church of Krypton."

Some of the roads in this area were very narrow.  They were great to ride through.  There was very little car traffic.

Almost everywhere in the woods here there is a vine of some sort that covers just about everything.  In the picture below you can see it covering the power lines.

Family graves in people's yards or next to their property is common here and something I have never seen before.  The one below was on a hill behind a home but some had their own small road leading leading to sites back in the woods.

The cyclists I camped with in the park yesterday had said that I would go through some "really rural areas" soon and chuckled a bit. I suspect this is the area he thinking of.  The picture below is the view approaching Combs, which was one of the larger and more attractive towns.

The surrounding areas were impoverished in comparison.  About half of the homes were old trailers with assorted junk or torn apart cars in the yard. About every 5th one had a large, mean dog roaming unfenced and unleashed.  I had the more dogs chase me this day than on any other.

A conversation with a convenience store owner in Combs solved a mystery I had been wondering about roughly since entering Missouri.  That is when I had started occasionally seeing burnt down structures.  There were more than I would expect based on chance and the frequency of them sharply increased in the last day or two.  One group of maybe 10 houses I came across earlier in the day had three that were burnt down.  Two were on one side of the road and had a perfectly fine house standing between them and the other was on the opposite side of the road.  It had me wondering how the fire could have jumped the way it did or if the building standards in the area were just really substandard. The store owner had asked about my trip and I had commented on how nice most of the area was to ride through and his response was,  "That's because you don't live here. It's nothin but a bunch of drug addicts."  That is when I finally realized that what I had been seeing was the effects of meth addiction, and meth labs, moving from home to home rather than random fires jumping from one building to another.

A bit past Combs I crossed under a freeway (or parkway, as they seem to be called here) and ran across this coal mining operation. I had been warned about the coal trucks in the area but really have not seen many. Yesterday I had to deal with a large number of gravel trucks but they were easy to deal with since they came in groups of three to five every 10 minutes or so. When I heard them coming I usually just got off the road.

Dwarf, KY:

After also riding through Emmalene and Carrie I spent the night at Hindman in a Cyclists B&B. It was about a half mile up into the woods and was really just the home of a local who had found a way of making some extra money by offering a room to cross country cyclists who were passing through.  Randy, the homeowner, was a folk arts director who worked with schools in the area. He had a very nice puppy and playing with it reminded me that not every dog was out to take a bite out of my leg.