Bike Shops, Cliffs, and Hills(!)

Content Advisory: This blog post is written and designed with children ten years old and younger in mind. Kids, you can go ahead and skip this paragraph and start reading. Adults, make sure you get permission from your child before reading. If you don't have a child, it's okay to get permission from your niece, nephew, 2nd cousin once removed, or that little girl who lives next doors who's always leaving her toys in your driveway (In all seriousness, I encourage all of you to share these blog posts with your children, maybe even read them to your children who are not yet able to read).

(Click here to find out what this ride is all about. I encourage all who are able to support the children of Ryves Youth Center with a donation. Click here to make a donation.)

**If your children have any questions or comments for me about my ride or about anything I've written, feel free to comment on my blog, and I will do my best to respond within 24 hours.

Today I rode 63 miles from McEwen, TN and ended up in Nashville, TN. I will spend the night with my uncle in Nashville and leave tomorrow headed toward Clarksville, TN.

About 18 miles into my ride today, I saw a bicycle shop on the side of the road. I stopped in and met the owner of the bike shop. His name was Scott. Since it was such a hot day, he gave me a bottle of water and I told him that I was doing this ride to try to help the kids at Ryves Youth Center in Terre Haute. I showed him my bicycle and when I tried to buy another new water bottle cage from him (a black cage, to match the black one I bought the other day, and he went ahead and put it on my bike for free. I guess that was his way of helping. It always makes me happy to meet people who want to help.

This is Scott, the owner of Road and Track Specialities Bicycle Center in Dickson, TN

Today I got to a part of Tennessee that is really hilly. I felt like I spent a lot of time either pedaling slowly up a hill, or zooming quickly down a hill. The good thing about the bicycle I have is that it has 12 different gears. If I'm going up a hill, I shift into one of the lower gears that make it easier to pedal up the hill. If I'm going down a hill, I shift into one of the higher gears, because the hill helps me to go faster so I can use the gears that are a little harder to pedal in. I wanted to show you an elevation graph that shows the last 22 miles of my bike ride today. Every time the line zigs up and then down again, that means I went up and down one hill. As you can see, I sent up and down a lot of hills (Remember, this is only the last part of the ride, so I went up and down a lot more hills earlier in the day). How many hills do you see on this graph? (See bottom of this post for the answer that I got).

Today I drove down some sections of highway that had high cliffs on one side and had a river on the other side. Here are some pictures of the cliffs:

Here is a picture of the river that was on the other side of the road opposite the cliff. You can't see it very well, because there were so many trees:

In Indiana there are not a lot of roads that are right next to a cliff like this one, but there are a lot of them in Kentucky and Tennessee. There are even some roads that have cliffs on both sides. When people were building these roads, sometimes they had to clear away parts of the big, rocky cliffs so that they could have enough room to put in a road. The way that they did this was to use dynamite, or some other kind of explosives. When I was a kid, I thought that people only used explosives to hurt other people or blow up buildings, but that's not true. There are a lot of good things that explosives can help us with, like building roads or helping to get coal out of coal mines (Of course, they have to be very careful while using the explosives so they don't get hurt). It's nice to know that we can use the things that we have to help other people and not hurt them. I would like to think that I am helping people by riding my bicycle, because I get to share these blogs with you, and because I get to tell more people about Ryves Youth Center so that more people might give money to help the kids at the center. Can you think of something that you have, and how you can use it to help other people?

Tomorrow I will be riding into Clarksville, Tennessee. My buddy Tim, who is an old friend that I met in the Army, will be riding with me for part of the way, and I will be staying at his house tomorrow night. I can't wait to tell you about it!

**I counted about 24 hills on this section of map. It's hard to get an exact number because some of the zigs and zags on the map are so small.