Poor Louise had another rough day. First, she fell over and broke her phone mount which required some electrical tape and duct tape wizardry by Brad. After lunch, she got a front tire puncture from a large staple. Fortunately, this occurred about two hundred yards from a dairy bar so we ordered root beer floats while we extracted the staple, put in a new tube and had a nice chat with a couple of the friendly locals.
We had some new scenery in the form of limestone layering on our route.
Part of the reason for the poverty in Kentucky seems to be that the locals didn’t get the long end of the stick when it came to the wealth from the coal in these hills. Industrialists negotiated very low rates with unknowing locals for the coal underground and left behind coal waste piles and black lung disease. This is of course only one side of the story, but it seems the accurate one.
Tomorrow we get into Hatfield/McCoy territory. Many families in the area brought clan conflicts from Scotland to the New World with them. A Confederate Hatfield killing a Union sympathizer McCoy during a battle led to years of murders, ambushes and raids with each side trying to be more barbarous than the other.
