Besides the riding, today was the first day that we started to see a lot of people again. Before we started, I tried to explain to Alex that where ever you went on your bike, people would come up and talk to you. I don't think that explanation was strong enough. It's more like, where ever you go on your bike, you're either treated like a rock star or the village idiot, in either case, people want to talk to you.

During our first stop of the day, in the town of Clay, we went into the local grocery store to buy snacks, Gatorade, and bananas. While we were walking around looking for the refrigerator full of cold drinks, a voice called out to us. It was a man wearing a denim supermarket outfit and a blue smock with coke bottle glasses, and crooked, brown, broken teeth , "where y'all riding to?"

"Connecticut."

"Woo wee! One day I'm gonna do that. In fact my brother-in-law and I bought some bikes a couple of years ago to start training. They're real nice bikes, cost $200 each. They're 10-speed mountain bikes with those hand brake things, you know what I'm talkin' about?"

"Yeah, that sounds real nice. When are you going on your trip?" I asked.

"Well, not sure if I'll ever do it. I got a wife and two boys I gotta take care of. Plus my brother-in-law, he was out of work a long time, but then he got a job driving a truck delivering cherry pickers up in Wisconsin. Now we never ride together, but we still talk about it."

"You could always ride up to Wisconsin."

"I guess, never thought about it. Too many hills though, I don't like hills. Last week I rode down the biggest hill in Kentucky, it's about 20 miles south of here and its about 3/4 of a mile long."

"That's the biggest hill in Kentucky?"

"Oh yeah, it's huge."

"What about eastern Kentucky? I heard the Appalachians are pretty big."