Day 55 – Charlottesville VA to Bumpass VA – 64 miles

Another day of pretty country roads, only one loose dog and perfect cycling weather. We started riding late because we wanted to check out the shops in the historic section of Charlottesville, which was great fun, but made for riding in some rush hour traffic later. 🤮

We started riding while Sue and Brad mooched around town some more before they went to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello from which, as usual, we asked for their main impressions. First, the building was very impressive, including that they scraped off the top of a hill to site it there. Second, the gardener, a slave, was rewarded with his freedom, but his wife and eight children were then sold. Third, the stewards of Monticello seem to have been slow learners because in the 1970’s a slave burial ground was paved over to build one of the parking lots, an act now cited as regrettable. Even the greatest of men and women are not perfect.

Lunch was on our own today and we struck cyclist gold. We arrived in Palmyra to seemingly no place to eat other than a gas station. An antique dealer then told us to go back to the grocery at the roundabout “you can’t miss it”. Guess who had missed it. At the deli counter in back we ordered bacon, lettuce, egg, tomato, onion and cheese sandwiches that were amazing. We chased them with a huge old style dill pickle and root beers made with real cane sugar. Perfect!

We are both very tired after 11 straight days of cycling since our Mammoth Cave rest day, and looking forward to the relatively flat riding of the coming final two days. That said, the last three days have had more climbing than expected so we may be surprised again, that flat isn’t so flat!

At the end of the day we took a short cut to save miles and time, but it put us into heavy traffic for a few miles and meant that we missed Lake Anna which Sue and Brad said was very pretty. Oops!