We woke up in the little forest alone, with no ticks in our tent and all our food untouched by squirrels.

Natalie made some porridge and coffee to start the morning while I got to laying things out to dry and packing away gear.

After applying bug spray and sunscreen we eventually got away at about 9am, so we need to continue to work on the early starts.

We carried on the Virginia Capital Trail until deviating to Bicycle Route 76, essentially the TransAmerica trail. The majority of this was on roads with no shoulder but very low amounts of traffic, most of which was slow.

We set up another nights accommodation with a WarmShowers host in Ashland and trucked on. At one point we decided we'd stop for lunch at a restaurant before Mechanicsville but at Chocominy Market we stopped to check how far off it was and Natalie googled it to find it was closed the first half of the week.

Luckily, Chicohominy Market was open for some vege shopping, so we picked up some freshly grown veges for some kind of stir fry, and went into the nearby gas station for some extra ingredients. We grabbed some surprisingly good burgers from the warmer and some pastries for extra biking fuel.

We were pretty tired after lunch, but kept trucking on again. Mechanicsville wasn't great to bike through, too busy and not enough bike lanes or shoulders. But as we got out onto the country roads again things started to look up. We finished our day by going off route for a couple km to the WarmShowers host, and we're blessed with smooth "black top" as the Americans say and car free roads.

The accommodation we found was a place to put our tent and use of a kitchen and bathroom. We didn't realise it was a small community of tiny homes around a main home. It was a nice spot to finish the day, with lots going on and somewhere we can finally wash clothes again. Hopefully we're in for an early night to push a little further tomorrow.