I slept soundly all night and woke refreshed, and got going pretty quickly. It was chilly and very foggy, visibility was very poor. But I was on back roads with very little traffic to start. The route was hilly but not crazy to Tazewell, I had a nice short gravel section early on which turned out to be the only one today. I stopped at the grocery store for a morning snack and topped off my bar reserves. The next few miles brought me to the climb of Raven Hill, which was pretty ridiculously steep. Both up and down. The fog had lifted so I got some great views up top. I then had a long gradual climb through a valley, and I was a bit tired and chafed. So I stopped at the next Dollar General for a snack and to apply some cream and afterward felt like a million bucks. Ready to tackle the neverending steep ups and downs. The next road right after the DG was incredibly fun. It had a lot of extremely steep rolling hills. I would pedal fast and nearly roll all the way up the next one, grind out the rest, then bomb the other side. Very narrow but decent pavement and mostly straight so I could just fly without worry. I then had a long climb up Joppa Mountain. It was a sort of main road judging from the low and constant gradient and quality of pavement but there wasn't any traffic at all. The descent was super fun. It was reasonably steep and very curvy with very high banking on the turns. So I felt comfortable leaning over at high speed. After Joppa is where the dogs got really annoying. It felt like every house had a couple of loose dogs running around and once one started barking, the whole road was aware of my presence before I arrived. I had to get off a few times here. But I made it through ok. Just hard to get a rhythm with the constant interruptions. At some point in this part of the day, don't remember exactly where, I rode up a super steep road with somewhat loose pea gravel. According to the Garmin it topped out at 18% after a long 15% part and I definitely felt like it was worse than the other hills today. But I made it over and the other side was just as steep but was pretty straight and the pavement was better. But I couldn't coast because of two cars stopped beside one another, blocking the road totally. So I had to screech to a halt and finally they finished their conversation and rolled away right when I had already wasted all my potential energy. I rode close to the Holston river for awhile next and it was a series of low rolling steep hills too. Nothing flat about today's ride. I crossed under I-40 on a main road that had mostly downhill to an even bigger highway crossing. Here I diverged a bit from my planned route to try to make it over to a TVA campground on the French Broad River. So I had to endure a few short miles on a slightly busy highway, mostly because of Saturday afternoon traffic. When I got there, I was dismayed to find out that the campground was way below me on the main road I was on, with no way to get down but do the highway climb again, up to the entrance. I survived this, and the camp office was closed. The camp host had a sign up saying off duty. I went to the website to pay for a site there since there wasn't any self pay envelopes. But today's date was greyed out and anyways you'd have to pay for at least two nights if booking online. Frustrated I rode up the hill and ended up finding a really good stealth spot in the woods between the overlook picnic area and the campground. It's actually better here anyway because I'm not right underneath the highway bridge. Who puts a campground right underneath a high traffic bridge? Terrible idea. It's quiet here though.