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Published: September 17th 2023
DAY 12: This morning we only had 10 mins before we were onto a gnarly, rocky track. We were on this track for around 20 miles before turning onto a faster gravel road which a grader was fixing worse. The grader had churned the road up into a slippery mess. Slipping and sliding on this track we encountered Hunters in 4wds who we making exceptionally slow progress. We gradually managed to work our way past them. This was probably one of the most slippery gravel tracks I have ridden on this trip without adopting a horizontal position.
Later in the day we encountered closed roads with a major detour albeit on good roads. We worked our way around the road closures and stopped in Tellicoe Plains Tennessee for lunch.
We checked around for accommodation and found the nearest was in Athens TN so we plotted a winding roads track to there which was a scenic route of 45kms. Checked into a Super 8 comfortable motel which had a helpful receptionist who got us into rooms on the ground floor. This is definitely part of the Bible belt. I counted at least 21 Churchs between lunch at Tellicoe Springs & Athens a
distance of only 25 miles. This has prompted Ian and Brenton to decide to start a church so now we get readings from the Gideon Bible in each motel.
Around 200kms today as we had decided to have a short early day.
DAY 13 We retraced our steps to the small town of Tellicoe Plains where we had lunch yesterday & where we left the route. We gassed up here and had a breakfast in a diner. There were Amish people setting up a firewood stall with horse drawn carts full of wood on the reserve in front of the diner.
Out of Tellicoe & we were soon onto a broken sealed road which had huge potholes which pretty quickly turned into a gravel track through a forest. We caught up to the two Amish horse & carts. As it was a steep climb they had offloaded everyone (women & kids who were walking). The two men were leading the horses I guess to give them a break on the climb. We crossed 2 streams without incident then a third much larger stream caught Ian out as he was crossing and he dropped his bike. I leapt off my
bike and rushed to help him pick his bike up to find the rocks were very slippery and over I went. Now I was pretty well soaked with boots full of water. We eventually all negotiated our way across and carried on up the track.
This track was climbing, gnarly, rocky & challenging. We did many miles of this climbing to around 800 metres avoiding washouts, rocks, water courses and to add a further challenge deer. Bryan apparently had a near miss with a deer which liked the look of his front wheel! This was a very challenging track and the type of riding we have come here for.
After a very short section of seal we were back into the Cherokee Forest on more gnarly tracks. Basically this went on for the whole day, the biggest change was around midday when it started to rain. Fortunately not heavily but enough to need to togg-up with our wets.
Turning off the track we headed into the small town of Ocoee Tenessee where we found a quality Inn with available rooms.
250kms today
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Tot: 0.262s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 14; qc: 67; dbt: 0.1037s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Chris Carter
non-member comment
Great adventure
Thanks for keeping us up to date all the photos and your reporting makes want get out and ride that part of the country.