Our First Bike Ride--4/18

We sleep late. Oatmeal and apples and walnuts for breakfast. We get the bikes down, clean them up, pump them up, get out the helmets, and set off at about noon for the 11-mile bike ride around the Cade’s Cove loop. We are joined by lots of cars. The road was definitely not modified for ease of movement. There are many steep hills; in fact, on 2 of them there are signs saying ‘Bicyclists MUST walk their bikes’, which, of course, we ignore. Many of the buildings are set back from the road, some as far as half a mile, so we park our bikes and walk in. The buildings are on the edge of the cove and the center was clear for farming. We see grazing deer, a mother bear and her cub cross the road in front of us, and there are birds galore. We run out of water about half way through so we are happy to see the visitor’s center, where we can fill up again. It is 4:30 before we emerge from the cove. I call it a biathlon—we ride and hike.

Back at the campground we talk to our neighbor with a 44’ RV and then go to visit the Navion owners in the next loop. The park is lightly inhabited. We are in B23 and the loops behind us are closed off. There are many openings yet. We are told that in the summer you can’t get in if you don’t have a reservation. There is no water hookup or electricity, so that probably limits some people. I like that there are so many tenters and a number of smaller RV’s. A Roadtrek 190, an Isata, and lots of pop-ups. We can fill up with water when we go to dump and we can run the generator for an hour a day (but not between 8 PM and 8 AM). In fact, we are running the generator now as I type this because the computer threatened to die on me. When we put on the generator, we got out the 2 cell phones and the electric toothbrush and plugged them in to charge them, too.

It is almost 8 before we get back home and fix dinner. We have gathered lots of firewood and have a wonderful blaze. The forecast (gathered at the ranger station) is for rain so we put the chairs back in the RV and go to bed.