Ride C2C #4 - Day 15: Christiansburg to Troutville, Virginia

Day 15 Date: 7/7/23
Day: 15
Route: Christiansburg to Trouteville
Miles: 46.9 with only 2,888 feet elevation gain
Total Miles: 586.23
MyZone MEPs: 498 

---DISCLAIMER--

OK - I have to fess up and give credit where credit is due - Doug has been “ghostwriting” the blogs for a little while now.  He always keeps a written journal with details of our routes and rather than me recreating the ride in my words, I’ve pretty much been copying over what he writes and then embellishing the details.  He is in charge of route planning and is more intimate with what road we were on when. I’m in charge of accommodations, events, and picture taking - so I’m busy looking about and not paying much attention to the specific road we are on.

Whew - my conscience is clear, now let us tell you about today…

TODAY WAS A GREAT DAY OF RIDING! 

We were up at 6:30, packed up and got our bags out of our room.

Another excellent breakfast in “ the Garden room“ with a big fruit parfait with homemade - exceptional -granola.  I suggested to Shannon that she should write a cookbook, and she already has a blog called “Grit Cooking - a Southern Girl Raised in the South”

More chatting with Shannon and Jason, then we love her vibes and it is actually hard to say goodbye. I feel like we are leaving good friends.

We said our goodbyes to Lu and Betty last night knowing that we’d miss them this morning.

On the road at about 8 AM and easy out of town and off to spectacular writing. We start off with about 4 miles of generally downhill on a quiet two lane curvy road.

Leslie, Shannon's sister, told us about this bridge to nowhere and the roads underneath that were constructed Virginia Tech to test autonomous vehicles. Pretty wild!

We practically fly through the first 15 miles by 9:30 AM.  We ride along lovely open fields interspersed with farms, meadows and forests.

We have a snack at the church and then off for more pleasant riding –

the first extended pleasant riding we’ve had on this entire trip.

There are lots of short climbs but not as deep as they have been as we are crossing the southern portion of the Shenandoah Valley. We could practically hear John Denver singing about the roads we were riding… Country roads take me home.

After about 25 miles we stop at a post office at Catawba (another nothing town - only a post office) for a quick peanut butter and honey sandwich.

Fortunately there is a water Spigot so we could fill up our water bottles since there are no services for the next 20 miles.

Back onto Rd., #785 and the miles fly by.

The next time we pass a cement plant,

more mostly downhill, and now getting into Semi rural and more traffic. And boom we hit Highway 220 pull into a convenient store to get her bearings. Highway 220 is a four lane very busy highway. We stop at Kroger‘s to get supplies and then forge on through heavy traffic for just a couple of miles

to reach our comfort suites in at about 2:20 PM.

They let us check in early and it’s a great spacious room where we wheel our bikes in. There are free mints, fresh hot cookies, free lemonade, and free laundry! 

We walk a block to the Cracker Barrel restaurant and it is hot out. No wonder we were tired even with this easy ride. We’ve been lucky so far with the weather it’s been in the 70s to 80s often with a cloud cover. But when the cloud cover is gone, like right now, it is hot hot hot.

Our waitress learns that we are riding our bikes across the country and shares that she has a heart to travel as well. She flew on an airplane for the first time recently to Chicago and simply loved the big city.

She has a dream of driving the pan American highway. When we asked her for the check she said “maybe now I’ll hold you hostage so we can talk some more“ we hope she can scrape her way out of where she is to find her heart and her people with travels.

Back to our hotel room to catch up on our travel journals and since the Cracker Barrel restaurant is the only thing around us, are we’ll go back there for dinner.