THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN feels good on my back as I amble down the sidewalk flanking Virginia Street in Clarksville. I'm on my way from the barber, headed to a local brewpub that's highly praised by the locals.
As I sit looking across the lake, enjoying a couple really tasty beers and a smashburger, Credence Clearwater Revival's "Have you ever seen the rain?" drifts out from the pub's sound system and I think back on how the day went.
An excellent medium for reflection and contemplation.
Thanks to the excellent hospitality shown me by my friends Nick and Diane, I didn't get on the road until about 09:40. Nick had mentioned yesterday that the large tract of wooded land a few miles from his place was a "slave camp", now a State Historical Site.
Nick and hs beloved "Mr. Tractor" were excellent hosts and companions.
These slave houses, built around 1851, were of a higher standard than usual. They were two stories, with elevated plank floors, and better built than many other slave quarters. The owner's motivations for that are lost to us, but it's undeniable that by slave housing standards the buildings were better than average. It's still shameful, though.
Moving on from there, it occurred to me that I must have left the piedmont, perhaps as early as my departure from Hillsborough yesterday morning. While not absolutely billiard table flat, the roads were noticeably less undulating, with very few hills and very long, low, gentle rises instead. That enabled me to make excellent time: my average speed was well above what I ordinarily manage, and I beat my initial ETA at Clarksville by an hour.
Flat, well-surfaced roads were the norm for today.
The other reason I made time was a reduction in photo stops. I've begun to feel that the churches I pass are similar enough that there's not much variety: they seem to fall into one or another of a very few styles so there's not a lot to differentiate those I passed today from those I've shown you previously.
The same is true for buildings falling into ruin and consumed by greenery: after a while, you get the picture and it doesn't really merit further repetition.
How about a photo of a lovely old country house rather than a ruin, just for a change of pace?
The countryside, while attractive and appealing, hasn't many remarkable features or landmarks. There are no towering cliffs, deep gorges, snow-capped mountains. It's far from featureless, but hard to capture in interesting photos.
Pretty enough, in a nuanced and subtle sort of way.
Just as I reached Oxford, NC, the halfway point for the day, a line of light rain passed overhead so I paused long enough to don my rain jacket, remove my socks (you know how I feel about riding with wet socks) and move the phone from the handlebar mount into my handlebar bag and out of the weather.
A few minutes later I took shelter under a funeral home's portico. Checking the radar, I could see that the line of showers would pass soon, and that I was riding into dryer if not clearer conditions after it did. I took the opportunity to check a few emails, and generally relax. In all, it cost me fewer than ten minutes of the "surplus" of time I'd built up relative to where I'd have been at my typical eight-miles-in-an-hour pace.
Ride With GPS continued to speak up intermittently, calling out alerts for upcoming turns; even though they were muffled by the lid of the handlebar bag they were invaluable. For some reason, my Garmin chose to show me only the distance remaining to my destination today, and no other turns or guidance alerts. It did at least display my planned route and current position on the map.
Even though I was following the East Coast Greenway, as confirmed by visual inspection of the OSM Cycle map layer on RWGPS, there were no signs along the way to indicate that to be true until about 15 miles out from Clarksville. Pro Tip for anyone hankering to ride the ECG: bring your own maps and navigation tools, don't rely on posted signage or you're sunk.
Unlike the numbered bike routes, signage for the ECG was rarer than hen's teeth for the first 40 miles of today's ride.
Arriving in Clarksville an hour earlier than I'd expected, I found a bustling main street (Virginia Street, appropriately) but no train station. Sorry Art, the Last Train to Clarksville must've been some time ago. But they did decorate the place with flags, presumably in my honor.
Virginia Street, decorated with flags in honor of my arrival.
Randie, a textile artist and my AirBnB host, lives and works on the second floor of the house. I have the run of the first floor, which is decorated with many examples of her work.
After settling in and getting a shower, I ambled down to the barber shop for a cleanup trim, then off to a local brewpub for the excellent beer you saw at the start of the post, and an equally enjoyable bacon cheddar smashburger. Yum!
