60.7 mi / 13.3 mph / 276 ft. climbing
Home: Budget Inn

Our campsite was just as perfect in the morning as it was last night. Crunchy-leaf dry, 58℉, and wind-protected by the surrounding forest. Arachnophobe Rett, to her credit, rejected my offer to also do the morning dishes, and instead steeled herself to face the wall of daddy-long-legs at the dishwashing station. But during my morning pee, I had seen something out of the corner of my eye, so I returned with her to sweep the area first. And, my incredibly-sensitive arachnid-detection system (which genetics has built into all humans) had fired correctly: in the sink strainer was the most-massive spider I’ve ever seen, one that even I was a bit freaked-out to fish out with a rag. It turned out to have been drowned, but along with the sign on the bathroom door warning about copperhead snakes, apparently Maryland is America’s Australia!

The forecast showed nearly 20mph tailwinds, so we’d added another 20 miles onto the 40-mile day I’d planned. We began with a short bit on the forested-median divided highway US-13, but the tailwind meant that we didn’t need to take the most-direct route, and could get back onto the country roads.

The beautiful emptiness immediately returned, with the only downside being the return of the chicken-farming operations. I actually don’t find the smell all that bad, but it’s pretty nauseating for Rett.

We’d started on the east side of US-13, but our attempts to find the empty roads on the west side were foiled multiple times. RideWithGPS has done a much better job than usual these last days of giving good routes on the first try, so I’d barely double-checked today’s route. At one point it put us down an old road paralleling the highway, but that road came to a sudden end of grass and brush and ditches, impassable even on bicycles, even though the map didn’t even indicate that it became unpaved at that point. Luckily a church on the old road wanted to advertise its presence to highway drivers, so had cleared the forest between the two. So we were able to ride/muscle the bikes through 100 yards of rough grass back to the highway.

True to our Delmarva riding, we didn’t actually cross into Virginia at the highway sign, and instead entered state #23 of our nomadacy at an unannounced point a mile down a border-following road as it made a slight curve to the south. There was a “front yard cemetery” at that point (a small graveyard on a family’s property), and we saw many more as we continued south. From our 2010 ride I associated these not with Virginia, but North Carolina, and southern North Carolina at that. But then I realized that’s because in 2010 we were on US-13 the entire time (to maximize our efficiency), and it wasn’t until we’d reached that southern part of North Carolina that we hit minor roads and got a chance to witness this Southern rural tradition. So this was yet another example showing the value of the go-slow(er) approach Rett has evolved me into.

At the near-dead railroad town of Hallwood, the sequence of turns and curves ended, and the road followed a (mostly ripped up) rail line. It was still beautiful, but after a stop at the Dollar Store in Parksley, it turned into an ugly concrete surface with a rough asphalt shoulder and heavier traffic that expected us to be in that shoulder.

At Onley we stopped for lunch at McDonald’s, which was right next to the motel I’d originally planned as our endpoint. Rett wouldn’t have minded stopping for the day, since the winds weren’t nearly as helpful as I’d led her to expect. And frankly they confused me too. Usually when forecasted winds are near the 15-20mph range, that’s strong enough to blow out any inconsistency, but these were frequently coming from different directions with variable strength, preventing the coast-fest we’d hoped for.

When we were leaving, a woman named Rose stopped us to ask what we were doing, and was delightfully blown away by our response. So blown away that she found us again in the freezer aisle at Walmart a couple miles down the road to ask more questions and express more admiration. She said she’d tell her McDonald’s group of ladies all about us!

We’re staying at a motel because the next campground would have required an even longer day (despite Rett’s frustration we haven’t had a 13mph average speed in forever, but it wasn’t the 20mph we’d have needed). Its poor reviews mostly complained about the rude manager, but he was perfectly pleasant to my charming wife when she checked us in.

But check-in was otherwise a disaster, since Rett discovered that her one pair of loose shorts had disappeared off her rear rack (presumably when repacking at Walmart), and I had a can of beer I’d just bought begin to empty its contents into my electronics-filled handlebar bag when I hit a bump. I got to it quickly enough that nothing got damaged, but it was still an hour’s worth of work to clean and dry everything. Rett was then getting really frustrated because her inability to decide where to go in Virginia Beach tomorrow to replace her shorts was preventing her from reaching the relaxing-downtime portion of her day. At least we didn’t have to set up camp!