Kiki Bikes Across America

Monday, June 8th: Berea, KY

Today is our first rest day and we’re staying with couchsurfers Brittany and John – they’re really cool and took us in on a last minute request two days prior to our arrival. We’re super lucky to be staying with them for two nights as it lets us catch up on stuff and relax a bit and not have to camp out and cook from our stoves.

We slept in this morning till about 9:15 or so and got up and they had gotten donuts for us so we had those and George made himself an omelet. I reorganized stuff and took off my aerobars to mail home – they weren’t working out anymore for me. The handlebar bag with my SLR was too heavy and was sagging constantly and really annoying. So the aerobars are gone and now it’s just my handlebar bag on the front with GPS and computer. So I redid my handlebar stuff and now I think it’ll stay better – just have to be careful of my brake cables and try to reposition the handlebar bag so it fits a little better, but I’m hoping that’s an easy fix.

I washed clothes and hung them to dry, washed up dishes in the kitchen and got ready to head to Walmart with the guys around 12:30. We restocked on the essentials/basic stuff to have on hand – pasta/rice, oatmeal, poptarts, fruit snacks…. that sort of thing. I also had to get more sunscreen as I have already gone through a bottle of SPF 50 in the past 13 days! After Walmart, we grabbed some Burger King – the guys are bit fans of BK. Then I  headed to the chiropractor at 3pm.

This was definitely a different chiropractic experience and a good one at that. I haven’t had a bad experience yet with any chiropractor – they’ve all been different. He really worked some interesting methods which I’d never heard of before — he was able to pinpoint problem areas in my body with certain muscles or joints and then fix them accordingly. I’m hoping this’ll help me on the ride. He thinks I jammed my ankle when I toppled over on my bike a couple days ago and as a result that caused pain to my upper hip/back of my hamstring muscle, which in the past two days was pretty sore at certain times of the day and when climbing hills sometimes noticeable as well. So here’s to hoping that was yet another successful chiropractic visit:)

Anyway, off to explore a little and grab some dinner soon, I think. The nice thing about having biked over 750 miles west is that it is lighter later in the day/evening here. It was definitely noticeable last night as we were walking back after ice cream and it was almost 9pm and still light out. We should be hitting a new time zone in about 2-3 days Chris thinks. And hopefully be out of Kentucky and into Illinois in about 3-4 days. We’ve just finished our second map set and have 8 more to go!!!

Back to biking tomorrow…