June 2nd, 2019 / (76km/47mi)
Another easy cruising day today getting me from Elizabethtown to Springfield. It’s just 76 km / 47 miles and reasonably little up and down the hills. Once I’m out of Elizabethtown, Google Maps directs me into a “highway” to the right, which is basically a quiet side-road that gets me back to the official bike trail route of TransAm at New Haven, KY. From there on it’s hills covered with fields and trees, plus farms, mansions and trailer homes and an occasional herds of cows sprinkled all over it. I pass the usual countless number of churches and cemeteries. A few loose dogs showing their balls by trying to chase mine help me to re-accelerate to top speed when I tend to be all too laid back. That at least makes me not always having the time to get annoyed by the omnipresent roadside propaganda.
The market for male-driver-operated lawn mowers in Kentucky – I’ve not seen a single woman on one so far (ladies, you have to fight for it!) – must be bigger than that of all other US states taken together. If there is someone outside anywhere not driving a pickup truck or tractor, then that person is driving a lawn mower mowing their vast lawn. I am sure there is an unwritten, perhaps even written, yes, probably a state or constitutional law, that states that all lawn in Kentucky in a 3 mile radius around any habitable housing, be it mansion or trailer home, has to be cut down to 1.5 inch height at any point in time. Or this whole obsession is one of those topics of national pride. Or competition with the neighbors going on. Anyways, it seems to be almost the only outdoor sports commonly practiced around here, except for “McDonald’s Driving-Thru” and fervently “praying for the unborn life”. I feel like an alien. I am. An alien observing. Wondering.