Errand running in Appalachia

I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but I enjoy running errands. There are those who are content to tick away their time on this planet staying down home on the farm. I am not one of those. Perhaps it is the city slicker in me. After a few days seeing the same 40 acres a strange sense of anxiety creeps into my soul and I must take my leave of these bucolic rolling Appalachian hills.

Which can be a bit of an issue in that I have to ride out of said rolling hills to get away from them. Very easily said not so easily done.

I also have a strange hang up that dictates that I have an excuse to be leaving home. I can't simply just go for a bike ride, that bike ride has to have a purpose. Some sort of task needs to be accomplished while on that bike ride. What task needed to be complete?

Luckily for me the house that my wife and I reside in now is a drafty ill-kept farmhouse built either by a man who thought he was in the 1890s or actually was living in the 1890s. Either way there are a series of interesting household repairs that are steadily presenting themselves thus granting me neverending perfect excuses to pump up the tires, charge the daytime visibility lights and strap on the heart rate monitor.

Today's excuse is this bathtub fixture.

You may note that there is water flowing not just down from the spigot but also to the left, the right, and slightly diagonal up towards the right crashing into the shower curtain, and in the absence of a shower curtain, watering the hardwood floors. Now, I am no experts in hardwood flooring but from what I can gather they do not need regular watering.  So I uninstalled the very peculiar bathtub spigot and placed it in my backpack to see if the local hardware store roughly 18 mi away would have a suitable replacement.

The ride started out pretty chilly. The day was only supposed to get up to 67°, and I was leaving just shortly after noon. The warmest part of the day would be in 2 hours when I would be climbing and descending in the shadiest stretch of my ride. I had learned on previous trips that when you are shaded by the old growth trees in the Chattahoochee National Forest it is roughly 10° colder then when you are in direct sunlight. Couple that with a higher humidity then I'm accustomed to having spent nearly the last decade in arid Colorado it's can cause me a fit of the shivers. 

I was very pleased to top out on the first climb in under 30 minutes which was a new personal best for me and signs that I am slowly but surely acclimating to the straight up the hill nature of the mountain roads here. As I crested I was passed by a Toyota RAV4, rather closely, which annoys me because passing in twisty tourney mountain roads is dangerous for both the motor vehicle and the cyclist. The speed limit of this area is 35 mph. The decline gradient is roughly 3% to sometimes as steep as 8%. This means that I am more than capable of maintaining an average descent speed of 35 mph. Which I did my best to demonstrate to the snotty RAV4 driver who assumed that I would be holding them up going down the mountain. Imagine their surprise when I tucked a car's length in behind their bumper and held that position all the way down the mountain to the stone pile gap roundabout. The descent appeared to be nerve-wracking for the driver as they tried to maintain 35 mph but we're unable to. I could see the driver constantly looking in their rear view to see if they had spit me off the back. I hope I only added to their discomfort by always being present smiling and waving at them. I cannot be certain of this, but I feel confident that nothing annoys a motor vehicle driver more than having a friendly cyclist tucked in behind them encouraging them to go faster than what they feel is safe. After all as we are all taught by the endless car commercials on television there is no faster way to get to where you want to be then behind the wheel of x branded car!

Roundabout reached I decided to do a couple circles and stop for photos. Legend has it that this stone pile is the burial site of a kidnapped Indian princess.

Tradition has it that when you visit the stone pile and are in search of better luck bring as round a river rock as you can find, write a message upon it and balance it at the top of the pile, if it stays you'll be granted good luck in pursuit of whatever you wrote on the stone, if it tumbles down... Well let's just hope that what you wrote on the rock was not "I hope I have a safe bicycle ride today."

I left the stone pile and reached the hardware store and was disappointed to learn that the type diameter that my spigot uses is rare if not obsolete and that they didn't have anything even with an adapter that would shrink down to fit the water pipe in my bathroom. The man behind the counter did recommend that I check another hardware store further in town, so I threw my leg over the bike and pedaled off again.

My luck was no better in the second hardware store. For all intents and purposes I might as well have written on a round River Rock "let me find the right tub spigot today" and then had the rock tumble down the pile and into the roadway to be crushed by an 18-wheeler.

My luck did turn around when I stopped in for a visit at the local bike shop however. I exchanged pleasantries with the owner and inquired if he was still in need of assistance occasionally around the shop. His eyes lit up and he said he most certainly did. I tried to play it cool, but I have to admit to you I was very excited. With an occasional part-time job in Dahlonega I would have a ready-made excuse to go for jaunts off of the horse farm. We agreed to get together for a coffee interview sometime next week. So please, dear reader, cross a finger, say a prayer, or send a good vibes for that meeting .

I wandered around town since I was deep in the heart of Dahlonega now. The quaint old village is built upon impressively steep hills. This is a college town and there are signs of liberal academia littered in what is mostly a quite conservative part of Georgia. In many ways it reminds me of the areas just outside of Boulder Colorado, which is pleasant to my heart.

Just off the village square I found a barbecue restaurant and decided to stop for lunch. I ordered the pork sandwich, a side of coleslaw, and a regular sized southern sweet tea. Now my teeth have been cut on Kansas City style barbecue, where the slathering of a molasses or honey-based sauce upon pork butt or short ribs or even lamb mutton is a key feature of the barbecue. What I am learning about this region's BBQ is that smoke is King. The pork sandwich came out piled moderately high and completely dry, rosy red ends leading to long sinewy strands of pulled pork. The side of coleslaw I was surprised to see was a cream slaw not a vinegar slaw. Thus far I have only encountered vinegar slaw at the other northern Georgia barbecue establishments. Which is great, because I love vinegar slaws and feel that a cream-based coleslaw is better left to the deli case of the local grocery store. The sweet tea was diabetic coma inducing, just the way I like it. The little ramekin of tangy sauce was perfectly serviceable and helped the dryness of the pork.

Photos from the BBQ place.

It's was not the finest barbecue that I have had in my time here in Georgia, but it was the best barbecue that I had had that day. Just don't ask me what other barbecue I had that day please.

Barbecue consumed I felt a hunger for a little icing on my lunch cake so I pulled out my phone and searched for a local coffee shop. Literally I typed "local coffee shop" into Google. What pops up? Starbucks. 🙄 Oh the cabal of corporate conglomerates! Further down the recommendations I found a tiny little coffee shop less than half a mile away, so I rolled to that one, Starbucks be damned!

It was there that I ran in to two fellow cyclists who had cycled North from the Atlanta metro area. The gentleman cyclist was riding a beautiful Dura Ace equipped Colnago disc brake version of the bicycle that had just won the Tour de France this year. It was absolutely beautiful, and I am pretty sure that my bike envy was painfully obvious. We exchanged Strava follows and agreed to meet up later in the week for a ride . Which is awesome ! Look at me making friends and stuff.

Coffee consumed and socializing done I had one more errand to run on the opposite side of the Appalachian trail. Last week I had ridden to Blairsville to pick up some produce from the local grocery store. On my way back I passed a tiny little roadside stand that had all of the produce that I had literally just ridden 20 miles to go pick up and was riding 20 mi back home with. I made a mental note that rather than ride a 40 mile round trip produce run perhaps I should stop here and see how good the tomatoes were. 

Little calfs I saw along the way.

Foolishly I had not really planned this route well, so now I was again roughly 20 miles away from the produce stand. However from the produce stand I would only have to ride 11 mi to get to home, which is great.

I stopped in at Sunrise Grocery grabbed a basket of the locally grown tomatoes, some bell peppers, chocolate covered gummy bears, a moon pie, and an RC cola. Let's be honest I said I was going to pick up healthy vegetables but really I am a total sucker for all of that  sugar.

Sunrise Grocery and Cabins

Backpacks stuffed to the gills with candy and tomatoes I did the final stretch back to the horse farm. If ever there was a better 60 mile bicycle errand run, I haven't been on it. What's even better about this particular errand is that I was totally unsuccessful in finding a replacement spigot! Which means I will have to do some research on where to get the appropriate spigot and then throw my leg over the bicycle once again and ride to wherever the new spigot may be! God bless this drafty ill-kept weird piped old farmhouse.

The sugar haul from this ride.

Till next time, Dear Reader...