Day 14 Knoxville - Tennessee

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The sun was setting as i rolled into Knoxville along route 11, i kept switching my gaze between it, and the lengthening shadows on the road in front of me as i searched for the telltale signs of the Motel chains and food outlets, that would tell me that my long day was  over. I didn't set off in the morning to ride 100 miles, or to even be here in Knoxville, but as i rounded a bend and went under a flyover,i could see at first a Shoney's, and then next to it a Motel, i knew that my day was over.

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The first thing i needed to do when i had set out from Kingsport this morning was to get hold of a decent map of Tennessee, i had looked in a couple of filling stations, but they have started to put stickers on them, to stop travelers from just using them for reference and then walking off, the nerve!! So a (not so quick) trip around  the old  part of town during which i could only find a secondhand book shop ( Closed on Mondays,yep, thats today!), and a newsagent that only had some for Virginia, found me frustratingly, heading off for the day with only a page torn out from the large  map book that my friends had given me  way back at the start of my ride down route 11, not ideal, but  i had wasted to much time, and i got me going in the general direction until i could buy one of those 'sealed' maps at the next filling station. So according to Sod's law at the next station i found the very thing i needed, a bit more that i needed in fact, a 70 page map book for just Tennessee,at A3 size it hade very road and creek marked, but most importantly for me it had, Contours!!!, a little thing  i had been missing so much from the other maps, all designed for cars and their drivers, who don't need to much to pay attention to whether they are going up hill or down dale, just so long as the air conditioning is working, and they can get to the next drive in whatever so that they don't have to get their fat arses out of the car.......Sorry (Deep Breaths....), where was i?

100 miles in 100 Degrees

Now armed, for the first time with all the information i could possibly need, i set off  for horizons new, knowing now exactly just what was over them. It was going to be a hot day, already at 9 o'clock it was 82 degrees with 64pc humidity, and a heat wave spreading over the country, so i knew it was gonna be a hard one.

I need to explain how i plan my day, how far i'm going to go, and where i will spend the night. There's not really that much to it,i know where i would like to be at some point from now,(at the moment it's Nashville), but i don't know how long its gonna take me, because it depends on many factors, the weather, the terrain, how i feel and what i see along the way, this is partly why i don't pre book any accommodation on the way. So the plan for today was to shorten the distance between Kingsport and Nashville without going into Knoxville, because i had heard a few bad reports about the place, and basically cities are scary places to be in on a bike when you don't know where you are going, so unless i had a specific reason to go into one i would try to avoid them as much as possible. I could see that if i stayed on the 'good old' 11w, it would get me in the right direction,and then with a little 'skillful' navigation i could bypass Knoxville tomorrow.

Having 'skillfully' managed to avoid the dreaded crossing of the Appalachians, by keeping to the Shenandoah Valley, in the same way that i was able to avoid getting to the restaurants i wanted in Kingsport because they were the other side of a six lane highway, and although i can ride the roads all day long, i could find neither  the nerve, or the way to get across. They run in a northeast to southwesterly direction, and now that i was 'officially' heading West, i have no choice, but to turn and face the remains of them. At this point they consist of the Clinch Mountain range to the north, and  Bays  Mountain to the south, with the valley between filled with a series of smaller ridges and valleys, and it was these that i now have to either follow or cross, depending on the route i choose. But first there was one place that i definitely had to pass through, and that was Rogersville!

Although i have for the most part been happy riding the 11, the volume of traffic had picked up in the last few days, and it was still so as i headed out today. I had also managed to pick up  a cycle route 76 recently, and  now that i was in Tennessee had the first proper cycle lanes to ride in, instead of the 'shoulder', which is an extra lane put there especially for the collection of bits of broken tires, coke cans, paper cups,broken glass and dead animals (usually Groundhogs), as well as the occasional (nervous) pedestrian and crazy cyclist, but i was unhappy using it, because of the amount of this crap that was around, but because of the increased traffic volume was unable to simply ride in the road, so spent my time switching from one to the other,with an eye on my mirror,and on the road ahead.

It was just after the obligatory photo shoot at the sign for Rogersville, that i had my first flat of the day, and only the second of the trip, it was the one i had been dreading, in the back wheel of a fully loaded bike,so off came the trailer, followed by the rack top bag, and then the panniers. By now the temperature showing on the Banks signs was 90, but i was getting a reading of 110 in the full sun, and as i stood there with all my worldly goods scattered around pulling and tugging at my tire in the heat that i noticed for the first time that the tread had completely worn away from the tire, a tire that was new when i set out.

To be Continued!