Bike Virginia Day 2 Abingdon

This year Bike Virginia was visiting 2 cities. Abingdon VA and Kingsport TN. Since I didn't want to ride 6 days in a row I went for the 3 day weekend option in Abingdon. On Friday morning we got up early. There was a steady rain but by the time we finished getting breakfast and packing up it was only a light rain. We had a 2 hour drive to Abingdon from Roanoke. The forecast had 30-50% chance of rain for the rest of the day so we weren't sure we were going to get a ride in once we got to Abingdon but we dressed in our bike cloths anyway.

Luckily when we arrived at the 4H center where the Bike Virginia base camp was the rain had stopped. We quickly got our bikes out and hit the road. Bike Virginia has a planned 22 route set up for today. They had published the route before hand so I looked at it and added an 10 loop at the start so we could get a longer ride in and see some area. I also did this because the way the weather looked there was good chance we would not get a ride in on Saturday.

The first impression of the road in the area was that it was a lot like Lancaster with narrow roads along farm fields. The hills around here were a little steeper but not much. When we joined the Bike Virginia route to roads were a little busier and we ran into a few traffic jams. Not with other biker but with cars not passing the bikers on the road. This made for some anxious biking as we had to almost walk up some hills behind the almost non moving cars.

Eventually we made it to the actual town of Abington for our rest stop. Besides the usual biker food they had root beer floats. Normally I would not eat something like this on a ride but with 7 mile to go I decided I could chance it. It was very hot a humid so the ice cream float really tasted good.

After getting back to the 4H center we headed for a shower at the hotel a couple of exits away.  Later that night we headed back for dinner at the 4H center since it was included as part of the package. It was cafeteria style food which was adequate but not great. There were a lot of other bikers milling around at dinner so we talked to a few of them It turned out that one people that I worked with in Lexington was at the ride so I spend some time catching up before heading back to the hotel to get ready for tomorrow's ride.