Day 15: Bikin' and Bourbon

Monday, June 17th, 2024

Red River Gorge Campground -> Lexington, KY

64.3 miles, 2702 ft elevation

I always love hearing the cacophonous sound of everyone’s alarm going off at the same time in the morning. However, I do not necessarily love it when that time is 5 AM. After suffering through the afternoon heat yesterday, we decided to get up as early as possible and skip our usual group lunch in an attempt to finish biking before it got too hot. 

As we descended from the Red River Gorge campground, I immediately started to notice how much the terrain had changed compared to the last few days, with the mountains being replaced by relatively flat farmland. The scenery of the Appalachians was nice, but I think I prefer not having to do 500 foot climbs several times a day!

Our plans to forgo a group lunch were tragically foiled when JD, Sophia and I decided to stop at Dairy Queen. The rest of the group quickly congregated there and we ended up sitting around chatting and eating for about 45 minutes. During this time we bought tickets for a distillery tour in Lexington. Since Lexington is the horse capital of the US, we also had a lovely discussion about how to scrape horse racing data to find guaranteed profit betting combinations.

The remainder of the ride was pretty uneventful. Like Rebecca, my mind is in constant conflict over whether I want to listen to music or focus on the world around me. Before the trip I started maintaining a list of audiobooks fully expecting to get through all of them by the end of the trip although I am ashamed to admit I haven’t started. The scenery inspired me to listen to mostly country music today. Highly recommend the relatively little known artist Corb Lund.

Once we got closer to Lexington we started to improvise our route a bit to get to the distillery, which was about 8 miles from our host. After storing our bikes in their garage, we got started with the tour. My knowledge of whiskey making has increased by at least 100x today although I was a little sad that most of the tour was sampling drinks, which JD, Cleo, and I were not able to participate in :(. 

Our hosts cooked a delicious dinner of turkey and Impossible burgers, with a homemade strawberry cake for dessert. If you take a look back at Day 7, you will see that I was overjoyed when our hosts read my bio on the website and bought me one of my favorite foods, key lime yogurt. Well, as fate would have it, the same thing happened today on my next blogging day! Thanks again to Ken and Tricia!