Instead the one rule of the road that I discovered, prevailed; nothing is ever easy. If you have a downhill, it will be immediately followed by an uphill. If it is flat, you'll have a headwind. If you have a tailwind, it'll be hilly. There is no such thing as an easy day. The only easy day is a day off. You may have an hour or two of ideal riding, but it won't last, you'll have to pay for it later in the day. Every day is a struggle and every mile is earned. So with this rule in effect, our relatively flat ride along the Ohio River was riddled with headwinds and busy roads, but in our opinion, the possibility of the winds switching was still much more alluring than having to cross the Appalachians.

Sections of West Virginia and the Ohio River are really pretty. There are neat, little river towns that are nicely preserved to keep their historic charm and there are sections of the river that twist and turn to offer rambling vistas of the bustling river traffic and the iron tressles. There are however, scores of behemoth eye sores, otherwise known as powerplants. Within one five mile stretch, there were four power plants; a hydro-electric plant, a nuclear plant, and two coal plants. Some of the plants tried to beautify the area with small parks and playgrounds, but that is a lot like trying to put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. The enormous smoke stacks and buildings, just overshadowed any effort to try and camouflage these monuments of industrialization.

A little up the road from the powerplants, we stopped at a gas station to get some snacks and to fill up our water bottles. When I was on the TransAmerica Trail, a good portion of the people I met, knew about the trail and the fact that people actually bike across the country. Once I left the trail, I became an oddity. As Alex and I were standing around our bikes, eating our snacks, a pickup truck pulled up. A man in his forties, with a slight limp, scraggly hair and a mesh baseball cap, exited his cab and walked into the store. A woman remained in the truck and stared at Alex and me with a perplexed grimace and her mouth open, most likely the result of her immense over bite and shockingly crooked teeth.

When the man came out of the store, he walked around us, sizing us up, the way an animal studies his prey before an attack. After completing a semi-circle, placing him between his truck and us, he asked "Where you boys coming from?"

"Oregon," I responded.

"Morgantown?"

"No, Oregon."

"Where's that? Oregontown, you say?"

"Not Oregontown, Oregon the state."

"All the way out west?"

"Yup."

"Well, what the hell would you do that for?"

"For fun."

"For fun, what you boys ain't got no brains in your head? How long's it take."

"I've been on the road since June 19th, my buddy started a few weeks ago."

"What, you've all got a lot of money or something?"

"No, just been planning and saving for a while."

"Y'all must have a lot of money to just go riding around the country for fun. Why would you do that?"