Perfection in Impermanence

I had spent the whole of the previous day promising myself that if I just kept going I could have an easy day the next, from South Boston to Yanceyville - a mere 61 kilometers.  But when I woke up there were a couple of interesting facts to contend with.  The rain was gone, it was bright and warm - and according to my wind app, there was going to be a tail wind for the morning, changing to a headwind in the second part of the afternoon.  Furthermore, the weather forecast for the following day was rain again ... and given the suffering so recently experienced, it seemed that the idiom "make hay while the sun shines"  was entirely apt - kilometers of hay, while the sun shines.  In addition, the motel on offer in Yanceyville was one star and had review comments like, "cleanliness could be improved" and more directly "That was one of the worst hotels that I have ever been to. I had to sleep on top of the bed, and it was just filthy and nasty" ... so out of bed I climbed, and onto the road I got - setting sail for Reidsville, 94 kilometers away.  And what a day it was.  So, impermanence... the value of pushing through the awfulness of the previous day's icy rain, the knee daggers, the skin-missing-ass, the volcano Prep - is to have a day like this; with confidence I can say it's the best day's cycling I've had in the past 25 years.  

Killer skies and space, weirdness of course, in this case the Alton International Airport.

The North Carolina state line.  Interesting how the road-lines started exactly at the border; it was a great road.  

Almost empty meandering roads, not much in the way of hills or traffic.

The lunch of champions.... kindly invited into a golf club restaurant.

The (of course) super-friendly and engaging stop-go sign operator - road-works in North Carolina.

Maybe North Carolina's roads used to be dreadful, and I happened to co-oncide with their improvement?  I say this because they were simply fantastic - out on the backroads I seemed to be traveling new blacktop only - and with a tailwind, just flying.  The way the stop-go's work for the road crews is also fascinating.  They have a lead and a following car (massive bakkie of course) with a billion lights, and these drive back and forth on one lane (in this case while the other gets it's paint lines), escourting a line of about 10 to 15 vehicles.  This posed a bit of a challenge for me, because there was no way that I was going to be able to keep up with the convoy on the uphills, the stop-go sign guy was unfased.  In that wonderfully American reassurance of "you allright" - he sent me off with the instruction to ride on the unused lane, but when I reached it, not on the new paint of course.  The new paint was miles off - so I had the surreal experience of having a perfect, unpainted, wide new road entirely to myself unless a convoy happened to be passing - which they did infrequently - and just the silence of the woods on this fabulous strip of tar.  Perfection.

Day 4 - South Boston to Reidsville - 101km