We only had 150 miles to ride today so we took our time getting ready this morning. Leisurely breakfast at the hotel at 7:00, haircuts over the kitchen sink (we brought our hair clippers sans flow-be) and a second coffee. We rolled out of town at 10:30 with thankfully light traffic heading north to our destination. Traffic heading south on the other hand was very heavy, people returning from their weekend get aways. It was an easy ride up route 65 all the way until we came to another closed bridge just 5 miles shy of the state park with a detour sign which we duly followed.
All was well until the detour routed us onto dirt. Well crap. No good options so I kept going and Diane followed behind me. A quick glance at the Apple Maps routing shows me 9 miles until the next turn off. F*k me. I felt really bad for Diane. The only saving grace was that it was a well maintained county road with smaller pea size gravel that was for the most part out of the main travel lanes.
We stayed in the middle lane (out of three) since it’s a shared lane for both directions of travel and thus has the least amount of gravel. We had to get out of that lane a couple of times though due to oncoming traffic and each time you do it can get a bit sketchy because you have to cross the accumulated gravel in between the lanes :-o. We made it through without incident only to face another mile and a half of gravel road from the park entrance to the campground. Wait for it, it gets ‘better’. The road to the park is an in-and-out so we have to go back the same way tomorrow to get back to a through street. Fun times :-).
Diane is such a trooper. She definitely earned her ‘unpaved road’ wings on this trip!
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- Diane out front, leading! Yeah.
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- just followin behind
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- ride through the woods
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- southbound traffic
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- beautiful scenery
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- county gravel/dirt road
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- gravel to the campsite
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- we just made it through too much gravel
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- yes, that’s uphill with a very sloped site
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- just hanging out
