June 9th, 2019 / (0km/0mi)
We leave Hazard in the morning skipping breakfast and leaving a questionable motel behind. The drive is longer than I had anticipated, especially when taking the backroads. But I wanted to follow the official bike trail route to see what we’re missing.
The route gets us through winding small roads with lush forests left and right. The hills are steep and that would have been really challenging climbs. Roads are not in great condition, so lots of potholes and bad surface. One has to be careful when bike riding here, especially when shooting down the steep hills. If you reach a spot where you can look a little bit further out into the hills, there’s endless mountains covered in dense green – forests as far as the eye can see. The sky is all grey and heavily covered in clouds. Streets are all wet and water still running along, as if it had just heavily rained minutes ago. But it is only later today that we actually hit the rain – and it’s seriously heavy rain. Soaking. Don’t want to be outside now having to ride a bike.
We make it to Charlottesville in the evening – it really was a long ride and we cut out a significant portion out of our bike route 🙁
We choose the Graduate Hotel, which is a wonderful contrast to the cheesy places we had the last 4 days. Once in a while I need a clean and comfortable spot to stay.
Weather forecast for tomorrow, Monday, is still bad with rain and thunderstorms. Depending on what weather app you look at, though. It could be anything from just overcast to rain all day long in between Charlottesville and Richmond, which is supposedly our next stop. Let’s see how we feel about continuing tomorrow morning. Perhaps we go. Perhaps we stay another night here and do some sightseeing and hanging out. We’re not in a rush, so it doesn’t really matter where we are spending another day. Tuesday the weather is consistently forecasted to be sunny again. That’s the latest point in time to continue on the route. Finally.