Shooooooort day but not easy. After yesterday’s tornado and flash flood warning, we had a short weather break to ride in in the morning, but we knew it would get shitty. Lots of climbing to get up onto, and then while riding on, the Blue Ridge Parkway. Started nice, just cool, dry, and super super pretty, but turned cold, wet, windy, foggy, and that made the climbing pretty hard. But we’re getting stronger. We booked this cabin last night for today knowing it’d be a short day because even though we could have made it up and over the Blue Ridge Parkway in one hard ~ 40-mile day, the descent off the parkway is so steep and twisty that it’s a challenge in DRY weather…but in wet conditions it’s just treacherous and stupid to try to descend and it’s going to rain all day today so we took the smarter short-day option so we can safely descend tomorrow. Natasha the owner of Love Ridge Mountain Lodging, and Noirin, her employee that cleans the cabins, gave us a cabin at a small cyclist’s discount, cleaned it first so we could check in by 100 pm instead of 400 pm, AND brought us some groceries to supplement what we carry on the bike to ensure we had enough food here in this remote location. Hot shower, drying our damp gear and soaking wet STINKY shoes and socks now, and just lounging in comparative luxury to some of the other places we sleep while bike touring, which sometimes feels basically one step above homeless. Traveling this way teaches us to really appreciate the daily luxuries that we definitely take for granted.