Day 10: Lexington to Troutville

May 22, 2023

Natural Bridge along the route was breathtaking

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We have our train from Roanoke booked on Wednesday so we have a bit of time to kill. We could have biked all the way there today but instead we planned to stop in Troutville for some free camping and to split up the days.

Setting out from our Super 8 Motel we finally headed into the centre of Lexington. It's quite a nice small college town but like many towns in the area it's surprisingly hilly.

We carried on through to some rural roads, with lots of wandering deer, squirrels, and even some cows bathing in the river. I can't get over how many squirrels there are! After a bit the houses started becoming a bit more run down and the locals started looking a bit creepy too but we turned off the road and suddenly we were going past huge old farmhouses.

Our first snack stop along this peaceful river

We turned off route in the mid morning to go to Natural Bridge State Park. I wasn't expecting how amazing it was. It was a pretty cheap entry into the park and it's only a few minutes of mostly downhill off route to arrive (uphill on the way back though). On the way there we even got to see our very first raccoon! Unfortunately, he was just like the Opossums yesterday and was a bit squished.

The trail follows a creek filled with small fish and almost immediately starts with the Natural Bridge. This thing is huge, at least 60m, a huge bridge carved out between two limestone cliffs.

The Natural Bridge is absolutely breathtaking in person

We saw another small snake, this time a water snake that a local said looked like one of the bad ones.

The trail continues another mile past an old Potassium Nitrate mining cave, a Monacan village recreation and ended with a waterfall. It's quite nice to get a walk around to see some sights instead of spending all day on the bike.

We finally got a picture with the two of us in it at the waterfall

The restaurant at the visitors centre was closed so we headed back to the route for some gas station lunch again, this time the best microwaved cheeseburger I've ever had.

My GPS and our paper map weren't agreeing with the cue sheet attached to the map so we had to do some reasoning to work out where to go from there but once we were on our way we were rewarded with some long downhills followed by short steep climbs and repeating. We were able to get to the top of almost each climb from the downhills so we weren't slowed down too much and it felt great.

We passed through Buchanan, one of the cutest towns I've seen on the trip so far but there was nothing we really needed there so we kept on trucking through to Troutville. Lots of climbing into Troutville but downhill all the way through town to the park we're camping in. It's a bit of trouble getting in contact with the guy we have to talk to to camp here but I think we're sorted now.

I cooked some dinner up on our camping stove and we're in our tent now, winding down for the night.

Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 588 km (365 miles)

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