1999-10-24 Hello All, I'm having a hard time estimating mileage today. My Tennessee map isn't showing miles for some of the little roads I was on, and my Georgia map is real cheap and seems to be good only for finding Exxon gas stations (guess where I picked it up). But I think I finally broke a hundred miles. That's a centennial in biker lingo (I hope). Starting south of Spring City, TN, I traveled south on 27 until Dayton. From there I followed 60 to Cleveland, struggled to push through Cleveland (nice roads, but a lot of curves and construction), and left on 74. I only went a few miles on 74 before turning off on 313 which runs east and hits 411 between Oldfort and Conasauga. From there, 411 was a straight shot south until into Georgia and on until just shy of Fairmount. There I found some curvy backroad to the west that lead me to my current campsite in a pine forest. I must have been going the right way because most of my route was marked with nuclear powerplant evacuation directions. I certainly should be in Atlanta sometime tomorrow. The scenery was probably just as good today as yesterday in some places, but my body was already losing its appreciation for mountains. Just about all the roads I was on had light traffic, which is good. All in all it wasn't a bad day of travel, but my legs just despised me. In Tennessee, most longer north-south roads run along mountain ridges and so are fairly flat and straight. East-west roads go over those ridges. The wind was out of the north-northeast and I spent a good deal of time heading east, over the hills against the wind. It's amazing how your mind and body can end up in two totally different realms. For instance at one point today my legs were groaning about this slight slope I was going up. Suddenly I see this steeper hill coming. So my mind says to my legs, "You want something to whine about? Just wait to we get to this hill and then we'll see you whine!" At that point I actually had to remind myself that my mind and my legs were part of the same body, because my mind was actually considering my legs a seperate entity. This wasn't all bad, because when my legs would be in great pain, it wouldn't affect the rest of me as much. I'd just let them cry out and continue whipping them until we got up the hill. Sorry I have no interesting stories for you today. All the dogs seem to be penned up. There is very little road kill action. The people I talked to, although nice, aren't all that story-worthy. And I haven't yet built a theory as to why the pattern on those black and orange caterpillars that like walking across roads has changed slightly as I've come further south. I do know that a couple days of resting and showers in Atlanta will do me good. By the way, for those of you who don't know, I'll be staying with people in Atlanta that belong to the same church as me. I already know some of them. I'm sure I'll get bombarded by the typical "why's" and "how's" tomorrow night that I've come to expect. But who knows, maybe none of them will care how I got there and we'll just go goof off. I think I'd like that better.

Northern Georgia