I began riding to Berea from Harrodsburg with mixed emotions. Today would be the last day I use the TransAmerica Trail maps. I've gotten so used to having my navigation skills put on auto pilot, as all that I needed to do was to turn when the maps told me and stop when they warned me of no services for the next 40 miles. The other really nice thing about the maps is that they are broken down into 30 mile segments. Since I'm going west to east, I'm always travelling left to right according to the maps. On each segment, north may be in a different direction, but the trail always flows left to right. Another great thing about the maps is the fact that they are broken down into 30 mile segments, which means on a big day, you can travel 4 map panels and go to sleep basking in your accomplishment. Once we start using highway maps, the same big day will mean we cover 4 inches, not nearly as satisfying, but it does mean Connecticut looks alot closer.

The last few miles into Berea began to get pretty hilly. Alex and I have usually been riding close together, but on the sections that are really hilly, I sometimes like to let it rip and wait for him several miles down the road. I don't have a baseline in which to see how much stronger my legs are now compared to when I started the trip, but I do know my legs usually are not that tired at the end of the day (I'm tired, but my legs usually aren't) and thay never get beyond a dull soreness. I stopped using my granny gear on most hills and tend to get faster the further up the hill I ride. It is a pretty cool feeling when you feel strong enough to sprint up the last quarter mile of a one mile hill. It really does help to have 4,000 miles and countless mountain passes under your belt.

So anyway, on the way to Berea, my legs were feeling strong, so I decided to pull ahead and wait for Alex once I got into town. Just before downtown, there was some road construction with a gravel pullout that looked like the perfect spot. The pullout was slanted somewhat considerably towards the road, so as I rode up the slant, I unclipped my uphill foot from my pedal to plant on the ground to keep me stable.

Now let me explain how biking pedals and shoes work. My pedals are actually just small pieces of springs and metal that are essentially just like ski bindings. You can adjust the tension so that they are easy to clip into or hard to clip into. My shoes have a little metal cleat attatched to the bottom that fits right into the binding. When you place your foot onto the pedal, you push down and the cleat "clips" into the binding. When you're clipped in, you can't get your foot off the pedal unless you twist your foot and pull your let away from the bike. This is actually done on purpose, so that you can maximize the energy output of your legs during a pedal stroke. If you're clipped in, then you can generate power on your bike stroke not only from pushing down on your pedal, but also when you're pulling up. A nice steady stroke, and a high cadence (90 rpm or leg rotations per minute is considered the most efficient, although Lance Armstrong pedals about 110 rpm), along with some leg strength will generally mean a much faster ride, using the same energy as if you're riding on a bike without special bike pedals.

At first, riding a bike with these kinds of pedals is awkward. Actually the riding isn't awkward, it's the clipping in and out that is awkward. The first rule, while often forgot at first, is to make sure you clip out before you start moving too slow, otherwise you'll tip over. When I got my first set of bike pedals and shoes, I went out for a ride around San Francisco, then over the Golden Gate bridge into Sausalito. I got the hang of clipping in and out rather quickly and soon became confident that I had mastered the technique.

As I rode through Sausalito, I arrived at an intersection with a four-way stop. There was a line of 3 cars in my lane of the intersection, so I rode confidently past each car and pulled up to the stop sign alongside a shiny silver cadillac with an elderly couple, the old lady staring at me as I approached. I looked into the car, nodded hello, and began to slow down to come to a stop at the intersection. By this time, I had slowed down so much, my bike began to wobble. I had forgotten to clip my foot out of the pedal several feet back and now didn't have the balance or the speed to be able to do so. It was helpless. When I reached the stop sign, with the elderly couple in the cadillac right next to me, staring at me, I tipped over. After I pushed my bike from on top of me, got up, dusted myself off and sat back on my bike, I noticed the cadillac was still sitting at the stop sign. The old couple was horrified. How could some idiot just fall over on his bike without putting out his feet to stop his fall?

So when I arrived into Berea, I pulled up the embankment to wait in the gravel pullout for Alex. As I rode up the embankment, I unclipped my right foot (this function quickly became second nature after my incident in Sausalito) to rest on the ground to give me balance. Unfortunately, my bike was halfway up the embankment and instead of leaning right, up the hill, my bike started to lean left, down the hill. The problem was, only my right foot was unclipped, my left foot was still in my pedal. Unable to move quick enough, I tipped over to my left, right into the road. Fortunately, there were no cars coming, so I picked my bike off of me, brushed myself up and began to wheel my bike back up the embankment to the gravel pullout. When I turned around, there was still no traffic, because a line of about 5 cars had stopped to watch in horror some idiot who couldn't put his foot down to stop himself from falling down a hill and having his bike land on top of him.

Hannah had given me directions to meet her at her friend Charley's woodshop. Berea, according to the pamphlet put out by the chamber of commerce, is the arts and crafts capital of Kentucky. Except for the college and the establishments in town that cater to the college students and their parents, almost every other building in the downtown was some sort of arts and crafts store. Berea really has a great, moutain, folky, artsy, craftsy-kind of feel to it. I'm not quite sure how else to describe it, except it made me want to get out a banjo, a big brown jug, a washboard, and a pair of spoons and start playing some rip-roaring hillbilly music.

When we found Charley's store, Hannah was waiting for us. We introduced ourselves, were introduced to Charley, given a brief tour of the building, put our bikes in the back of Charley's woodshop and went upstairs to his loft. Apparently a tornado came through downtown Berea a few years back and wiped out the entire historic district, which is where Charley's original woodshop was, so he built a new building and was in the process of completing his loft. Although he clearly had more work to do, the space was really cool. It was all wood and windows and the main living space was probably 1500 square feet. After Alex and I showered, Hannah made us lunch and the four of us sat around talking, getting acquainted with one another.

Charley and Hannah knew each other from contra dancing. From what I gathered, contra dancing is kind of like square dancing, but is done to folky, bluegrass music instead of barnyard country music. There is a caller, a live band with fiddles and other bluegrass intstruments, and during each dance, you constantly switch partners. I guess every week Berea hosts a contra dance in which people sometimes drive up to three hours to attend, then drive home three hours when it is over. Supposedly, there are a lot of towns throughout Kentucky that have regular contra dances, but the most popular and the best is in Berea. On average, over 200 people attend every week.

After getting our brief overview of contra dancing, Charley began to tell us about his woodworking. He specializes in building Shaker rocking chairs and Shaker boxes. The central Kentucky area was home to a large Shaker population and their belief of living a simple existence continues to have a large influence on the crafts and culture of the area. Unfortunately after over 20 years of mastering his craft, Charley is selling his shop and leaving the business of being a professional carpenter. "When I started out as a carpenter, I believed there was something noble from perfecting a craft, from turning raw materials into finished goods and selling those goods to a wanting public. You felt good about what you were doing, seeing something actually get built by your own hands, then having someone pay for that added value that you provided, so they wouldn't have to make those products by themselves," Charley lectured.

"During my time as a carpenter, I received all the honors and awards a woodworker could achieve. I was on the cover of magazines, featured in all sorts of publications and won a lot of awards. I pretty much was one of the best around, but during the greatest economic boom in history, when millionaires were being created every day, I managed to live below the poverty level. I lived within my means and lived a comfortable life, but the people who weren't creating anything, were getting filthy rich. That trend really worries me, how can we sustain ourselves as an economy and a nation, when no one is actually building anything anymore. Who is going to build our products, make the things that people need? So I decided to give up my craft and try to make my riches some other way. I don't really know how I'm going to do it, or what I ultimately want to end up doing, but for the time being, I got a job as a building inspector. This way, all I have to do is go to a building, look around, tell someone that something is incorrect and tell them to fix it. A couple of days later, I'll come back, look at what I told them to fix, then find something else to tell them they need to fix. I'm actually looking forward to not having to do the work."

Our conversation then turned to what Alex and I did for a living. When asked what I did for a living, I said I was one of those people who didn't build anything. I said that essentially, I just listen to what clients want, convert their requirements into technical specifications and hand it over to the engineers. After the engineers build what the clients want, I then try and convince the client that what we built is what they asked for. Of course what the client wants always changes somewhere along the line, so what we build never matches what they say they need at the end of the project, so we tell them we'll make it match what they need if they give us more money. It's an almost never ending process where no one is ever really satisfied and at the end of the day, I never make anything. I don't turn raw materials into finished goods, I just sit around and manipulate a string of zeros and ones into lines of computer code that behaves somewhat the way the client wants. You can't sit back at the end of a project and look at a product and say, this is what I built today.