If you happened to be watching my progress today (you can do that by clicking the SPOT link on the web page) you might have thought, what the heck is he doing.  It looks kinda like I was taking the Great Circle Route between Nashville and Morristown.  However, if you were watching my track and comparing that with a weather radar map of the area, you would have seen that I was actually dodging the rain.  What I’m doing, rather successfully, is staying between two lines of moving thunderstorms.  Kinda like being in the trough between two wave crests.  The roads I rode on today were most often wet, but I never got rained on, not even a drop.  I have to be careful though because hubris is rewarded with failure, and I had enough of that last year.  My 2016 Florida rain experience is indelibly burned into my brain.

You’ve likely heard of this place but don’t really remember anything about it.  The Cumberland Gap is a narrow pass through the long ridge of the Cumberland Mountains, within the Appalachian Mountains.  Famous in American colonial history as a key passageway through the lower central Appalachians.  Long used by Native Americans (Cherokee out here), the Cumberland Gap was brought to the attention of settlers in 1750.  The path was explored by a team of frontiersmen led by Daniel Boone, making it accessible to thousands of pioneers who used it to journey into the western frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee.

I remembered “some” of that and thought – Hey, it would be cool to go through the Cumberland Gap – so I did.  I’d be lying if I said it was anything other than uneventful.  These days you go don’t go through the Cumberland Gap, you go through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel, and the clouds were so low that seeing that it was actually a “gap” wasn’t possible.  It is a long tunnel though (4,600 feet) and one of only two tunnels that cross state lines (Kentucky into Tennessee).

About 15 miles on the other side of the tunnel, was this overlook.  Scenery is a little tough to come by out here.  With all the trees everywhere – you can’t see the forest.  I think there’s some kinda saying about that…..That’s the reservoir you see in the background here is Cherokee Lake.  You can click on the picture to see the full size version.

I’m leaving you with a rather short post from a mostly riding day.  I did stop for a lunch in Corbin, Kentucky at the Col Sanders KFC Museum.  This is the town where he built his first restaurant, complete with a hotel.  However, that short story and this ceramic statue is about the only thing they’ve got going on at the “museum.”  It was like Col Sanders himself was telling me – “Eat your lunch and get back on your motorcycle, there’s nothing to see here.”  And that’s exactly what I did.