Day 12

Finally I'm getting pictures posted. On top is a picture of the downtown square of Columbia, Tennessee. Next is one of many mansions we passed leaving town, this picture was taken while I was riding! The poster in the next picture was on the little store in Shady Grove, for a Civil War re-enactment coming up, and I liked the part about "Battles daily at 2:00"! The only armadillos we seen were road kill, sorry about that. And last, this is where we camped that night. Later in the evening a few other bicyclists arrived too and set up tents.

Wednesday April 14. The bike part arrived and my friend's bike was soon fixed and we were ready to roll. We pedaled west out of Columbia on Hwy. 50, over hill after hill. The scenery is great. It's tree-covered rolling hills, and everything is so GREEN: the grass, shrubs, and trees. There are little salamanders scurrying around in the dry leaves on the roadside banks. You have to look quick to see them before they dart under something. The locals call them "puppy dogs" or "water dogs", and they use them for bait for catfish. A large percentage of the homes are made out of brick, mostly red brick, and there are low fences/walls made out of flat field stones along in front of many of them. We went through a town called "Sawdust", then passed a road called "Fatty Bread Rd". I was still musing over that when we passed "Totty Lane". We pedaled up a huge hill and down into the town of Shady Grove, which consisted of the Duck River running through the bottom of a tiny vally, and a little store with a wooden floor, and it doubled as the post office. A handful of houses among the trees. We got bottles of chocolate milk and drank them, then pedaled back half a mile to the Trace and camped at a wayside near the Shady Grove exit. Miles ridden today: 28.5