STL2ATL 14-16 – Chattanooga, TN to Marietta, GA

Mission accomplished! I made it to David and Katie’s house. All in all, it was a 630 mile tour with 33,700 feet of ascending spread over 17 days of pedaling. You can geek out on maps and miles and feet in my STL2ATL RideWithGPS collection.

Day 14 – Chattanooga, TN to LaFayette, GA

Having hauled ass to get into Chattanooga to avoid forecast rain, I was rewarded with… zero rain overnight and a rest day of beautiful weather. Go figure. And because no good effort goes unpunished, I got the rain on the morning that I was leaving Chattanooga. I’ll call it liquid sunshine. Yeah, that’s it. Liquid sunshine.

Traffic on the Cummings Highway around the north end of Lookout Mountain was thankfully polite and the view of the Tennessee River was worth the wet climb. I do have to wonder how many Lookout Mountains there are in the world; probably a lot.

I made a stop at the International Towing & Recovery Museum. This small museum was fascinating.

From there it was just 25 miles to my hotel in LaFayette. The rain moved on and I got a beautiful day of blue skies and puffy clouds. I laughed out loud when I found myself riding through a town named Flintstone. No, I did not see Fred.

The town of Chickamauga has one of the coolest water towers I have seen.

I stopped on another little bridge for a break and a snack. A woman stopped to chat as she was driving across the bridge. She got That Look when I told here that I was bicycling from St. Louis to Atlanta. She wanted to know how I was getting from there (north of LaFayette) to Atlanta; I wasn’t going on the interstate, was I? No, I assured her, I was going on back roads. She surprised me with, “I didn’t know that there were back roads to Atlanta.”

LaFayette turned out to be a nice town with a huge bonus: the Vienna Bier Garten. I got Jager schnitzel and a hefeweizen with red cabbage and spaetzle and, let me assure you, my day was complete in the finest possible way.

My hotel had a sign saying that they were not serving breakfast and they hoped it would not be an inconvenience. I figured that that would be a good excuse to go over the the Waffle House. Nope. The building was there. The sign was up. The lights were on. But there was a poster in the window reading, “Opening Soon.” I hit up Walmart for some more camp food, which I needed for the next two days, and had a camp-breakfast in my room: an orange plus some instant oatmeal with peanut butter stirred in for protein.

Day 15 – LaFayette, GA to The Pocket Recreation Area

This was supposed to be an easy-ish 22 mile ride into The Pocket Recreation Area. Easy-ish because it involved almost 1,700 feet of ascending. It ended up being more of an adventure than I planned. As I turned onto one of the roads leading up the mountain, I saw a Dead End sign. (Remember those? Most have been replaced by the more politically correct No Outlet. I prefer Dead End.) I tried the next two roads up the street. Both of those were very very rough gravel and were essentially short driveways. Neither went anywhere at all.

I rode back to the Dead End road and lucked out. The guy who lived on the corner happened to be outside. I asked him whether I could get through. No, he told me. Somebody had bought the land up the hill, posted No Trespassing signs, and even gated the road. I ended up riding a mile to the north to find another road up the mountain.

That was going fine, if tiring, when some strong young buck came riding up the hill behind me. We chatted for a few minutes. He had ridden out from Atlanta the day before (it was going to take me 2.5 days to get from there to Atlanta) and was headed home. He did allow as how he had only enough stuff in his pack for a single overnight, not the four fully loaded panniers that I was hauling. Then he sped up the hill, leaving me wishing for quads like his.

I found a campsite near John’s Creek. Standing in cold rushing water was just what I needed after the day’s sweaty ride.

Day 16 – The Pocket Recreation Area to Red Top Mountain State Park

Do you remember that rain that I rode hard to avoid between Sewanee and Chattanooga? The rain that the weather gods gifted me with two days later? Apparently that was not enough rain. I got dumped on starting at 5:15am. Despite the thunder and the pounding rain, I fell asleep again, slept soundly until 7:00am, and woke completely dry inside my tent. I have an REI Flash Air 2 tent and it works really really well.

I ate breakfast inside my tent. I dressed and, sitting inside, packed my panniers with everything except the tent itself and the ground cloth underneath it. Then it was out into the downpour. I hung the panniers on the bike to get them off the ground and out of the way. My tent comes down quickly and does not require any fussy folding or rolling to fit into its carry bag. I gave it a quick roll-up and shoved it into the bag along with the poles, stakes, and about a quart of water. Then I rolled up the ground cloth and stuffed it in, too, along with another quart of water. I shoved the bag into my left front pannier (unfortunately) next to my 100% dry sleeping bag. There was nothing for it, though, it was the only place to put the tent. In retrospect, I suppose that I could have tied the tent onto the outside of a pannier or onto the top of the rear cargo rack. That would have kept my sleeping bag dry.

I put my bicycling helmet on over the hood of my rain jacket, said my good-byes to the folks camped next door, and headed for Red Top Mountain State Park, 47 miles away.

A few miles south, I regained cell phone signal and was able to text Candy that all was well and mostly dry. Cell phone service is so ubiquitous these days that it had been decidedly weird to have no signal overnight.

Within an hour, the rain had stopped. Within two, I was seeing blue sky through gaps in the clouds. I crossed the Oostanaula River and took the mandatory picture.

A couple more hours of pedaling and a stop for lunch found me passing Adairsville. This was to have been my stop for the night. There are no campgrounds in town but there are two RV parks. I figured that one of them would be able to find room for me. Nope. Neither one would even entertain the notion of a bicycle tourist with a tent. To make up for that affront, Adairsville had this public art display awaiting me.

I found the highlight of the whole day’s ride, maybe even the whole tour, outside Cartersville. When I saw this sign, I had to take a picture and yell loud enough that my mother could hear me, “Mom! I need money for the book sale!!”

From there, the ride up into Red Top Mountain State Park was steep but rewarding. I had a nice tent site sans neighbors. I could see the lake through the trees. I had a water spigot at my site. I even found a nice shower with plenty of hot water.

I hung my tent and sleeping bag on a line to dry. By the time I pitched the tent and went to bed, both were dry-ish. Had it not been a humid night, I would have called them “dry.”

Day 17 – Red Top Mountain State Park to David & Katie’s House

My last day’s ride was a short 18 miles so I took the time for a seven mile hike around the park in the morning. So pretty!

Pretty as it was, I had to go. The campground host had come by to ask if I was leaving because another camper had reserved the site for the night. Yes, I assured her, I would be gone by noon. (I almost made it. I was gone by 12:15pm.)

David texted me that he had found the perfect place for me to stop for lunch. I was actually going to be riding right past Art’s Bagels & More. Of course, I stopped there. The bagels were excellent.

An hour later, I was in David’s driveway.