Tour Plan: Deep South and Tennessee Valley

It looked like there would be no tour for 2014, but in the end, almost predictably, lunacy has prevailed.

Jack and I plan to explore the Deep South and Tennessee Valley this fall, following a combination of Adventure Cycling’s Great Rivers South route and their Underground Railroad route.   We’ll call it our Natchez Trace tour.  The plan, rough as it is at the moment, looks something like this:

Aside from touring the historic deep south, we hope to enjoy riding along the Natchez Trace.  It appears there are lots of camping options, including some “bicycle-only” campgrounds.  From some of the crazyguy accounts, it sounds like we can expect beauty, humid heat, friendly people, and mosquitoes.  I’m not sure if we’ll get any fall leaf colors.

From there we’ll do some up-and-down hill climbing through Tennessee, then work our way up through the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky.  Our planned finish just south of Evansville Indiana will take us to my dear in-laws home.

What should be especially interesting is my thorough lack of bike fitness at the moment, having only ridden a few hundred miles this year.  I took the unloaded Surly out for a spin – more like a grind – around Usery Mountain this morning.  Now hurting, I can’t even imagine loading that thing up.

Nevertheless, I’m excited to have this tour on the horizon.

By the way, I’ve now prohibited the posting of comments to this blog. It is a sad way of surrendering to the spammers, but the strongest barricade I can think of.