Not waving but drowning.

Today started with what the weather forecasters here call 'considerable cloudiness', moved on to what we would call 'very considerable raininess' and ended with astronomical humidity.  It was a shortish day from Harrisonburg to Staunton, so we decided to try two new things - a quiet route given to us by a bike shop in Harrisonburg, using roads not on any map we have see, and a detour to Natural Chimneys state park.  We had a few false starts and u turns on the new bike route, but made it to Natural Chimneys mid morning. All the literature had 'bigged' this up to be a close contender for one of the seven wonders of the world, so we were expecting loads of people and rock stacks like the Old Man of Hoy. Instead we were faced with a deserted car park, a closed visitor centre and 2 or 3 fairly modest rock towers.  It was very peaceful!!!  We had however missed the largest jousting tournament in the USA, which apparently had taken place last Sat. The grandstand would have held about 20 people and there was no obvious sign of a horse having crossed the rather small grassy area, from which I concluded that jousting is not about to overtake baseball in the nation's affections.

We got back on our new route, which was indeed virtually traffic free - it was also free of any flat sections, as you will see from the profile shown below. We were about 6 miles outside Staunton when it started to rain, heavily enough to require jackets and lights. We both needed food badly and stopped  at the first garage we came to on the edge of town. It was a bad choice for anything edible - the egg sandwich we shared had a sell by date sometime next year and bore no resemblance to egg(or in fact any other edible substance known to man). We topped up with Mrs Freshley's carrot cake, which had travelled well surprisingly, and then sheltered in the car wash booth waiting for the torrential rain to ease.  When it did we made a break for it and managed about a mile before it just became too dangerous to ride. We ended up hanging out under the canopy outside Valley Denture Care for about an hour and a half as the drains struggled to cope and the thunder roared around us. 

At a brief easing we made it a few hundred yards to a bike shop, called Black Dog Cycles. I got a bit of a shock on opening the door to find a large black dog bounding towards me. Luckily I didn't have to negotiate the use of a track pump with him.  Tyres fully inflated again we found it had stopped raining and the sun had come out, with the humidity rising by the second. It was still nearly 5 miles (including some doubling back) until we finally made it to the hotel, by this time almost expiring from heat exhaustion. Not many pictures today except of rain bouncing off puddles. We are expecting more of the same tomorrow.  48 miles and 3,000 ft of climb.

2 signs that caught my eye on the road. Clinic for cosmetic dentistry 'We go the extra smile' and on some Autocentre billboard 'Watch your 'Spendometer'