Appalachian Adventure Day 1: Madison to Lexington KY

Hi everyone,

Happy Fourth of July!

I'm having a hard time naming this trip. Originally, I thought about "Revisiting the Civil War" since we are going to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary re-enactment, but we are spending the second half of the ride on the Appalachian Trail.

Maybe "Appalachia via the Civil War"? Sean says "Appalachian Adventure" so I think we'll go with that.

We left home yesterday and stopped in Madison, WI and spent the night with my brother and his family. They treated us to a wonderful picnic and concert on the Capital grounds with some of their friends.

We took off bright and early this morning and headed to Indiana.

At one of our gas stops, we started chatting with another motorcyclist who was obviously on an adventure of his own. Come to find out that he was headed to Gettysburg too! We were taking different routes so we parted ways - vowing to meet again on the battlefield.

Traffic was fairly light for most of the day and the riding was easy, until we ran into rain before we made it to the Ohio state line.

Actually, we  only spent about 5 minutes in Ohio, but we got the picture! We'll be riding across the entire state in a couple of years anyway so this will save us a future stop.  This is the first (and hopefully last) time we had to take a picture with our rain gear on - and only the second time we had to break the gear out on any our trips. We've been lucky so far.

We headed south to Kentucky (we got that picture last year) and though an annoying storm slowed us down and we didn't get quite as far as we wanted, we managed to put on almost 600 miles today.

Fun facts:

Low gas price so far: $3.25 in Indiana
High gas price so far: $3.49 in Indiana
Cloudy all day, but warm. Rain late in the day.
Miles day .5: 303
Miles day 1: 566