Day 10 – Buckhorn Lake to Berea

By the end of today, we had officially left the mountains of eastern Kentucky. But boy, do I feel like it took something out of me.

We left Buckhorn Lake State Park this morning in the MCC to get back to the route. Upon pulling over to the side of the road to get out, I darn near stepped in poison ivy. It turns out, there’s a LOT of poison ivy on this route. Every time you stop, you have to check to make sure you’re not about to step in poison ivy… or a snake – there are a lot of them around as well.

Today was punishing. It was hot and humid… and there was an incredible amount of vertical. 5.5k’ of vertical in just over 70 miles. And much of that climbing was at 10%+ grades. I was definitely gassed towards the end of the ride.

When I created the GPS route the night before, I had only taken the route to the city line for Berea. It turns out, Berea is actually a large town. Well, there aren’t that many people, but it’s wide. Our hotel is on route, so Heidi took a picture of the map directions and sent them to me so I could navigate in. She’s so awesome 🙂

Also, today was the first day we had to do any real RV specific maintenance. The “black water” tank was almost full. For those that don’t know what black water is in the RV context, that’s the holding tank for the waste from the toilet. Grey water is sink/shower water, in case you were wondering. So we found the local RV park, and for the low low price of $5, we got to empty our tanks. Bobby got to help. He is clearly thrilled.

As a side note, we see a lot of roadkill on the rides. Today the roadkill du jour was turtle. I saw an unbelievable number of dead turtles on the road. I almost racked up one myself on a downhill. I’m happy to have avoided that disaster (for both the turtle and myself)