Forget about how hot it was yesterday, today was a blast furnace!!We got coffee this morning and then had a pleasant ride through more 1-1/2 lane paved back roads courtesy of Pocahontas (the GPS). The
patchwork fields were either mowed or being mowed and the smell of fresh grass in the cool morning air was sweet after the heat of the previous day. Dave got us to Corbin, which is the home of Colonel Sanders (yup, the Kentucky Fried Chicken mogel). The museum was a re-creation of his cafe (seats 40) with a modern KFC franchise attached to it.
He was a late bloomer and started a service station when he was 40, got the cafe running out back of the gas station, at age 65 the cafe failed because the interstate went through and he hit the road trying to start some franchises with his chicken recipe. At he tender age of 74, he sold the franchise business for $2M, and the rest is history. The town of Corbin seems pretty non-plused by all this. I was expecting something more like Dollywood (ChickenWood?) with a ColeSlawSlide water park or some other kind of rides (Mashed Potato Mountain or riding a drumstick down a river of greasy gravy, or something). So the lesson here is you can start a career anytime and never give up!!
From Corbin we let the GPS get send us south and once again we were rewarded with more single lane paved beauties. And the temperature started going up!!
The further south we got, the more hardscrabble things got. We saw more out of business business' than ones still in business. Gas stations with MiniMarts are doing well, and WalMarts with all the chain restaurants are sprinkled in enough places to chock out any local business'. We did see a lot of deer processing and taxidermy places so those seems to be doing ok.
There is a long flat valley in southern Tennessee that we went the length of and it was in this gash that we saw the temperature hit 103 on Daves bike. I ran with just a t-shirt which may or may have helped.
We crossed the border and into the really dead town of Bridgeport Alabama. There was only one motel run by a guy that did not speak English. He either did not have a room with 2 beds or he was trying to explain to us how the inner workings of spaceships work, we were not sure which, so we headed back north 10 miles to one of the WalMart / gas station / fast food / hotel oasis' and got a room. The heat was still oppressive as the sun went down. Tomorrow we dip back down into Alabama, Georgia and then back into the mountains to try and escape the heat.
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