Day 22 - June 25, 2013 - Glendale, KY to Falls of Rough, KY

Mileage - about 48 (I think?)

Total mileage - 659.3

After our tent dried a bit from the humidity overnight, we headed out to get back to the route after our weekend off.  We were about 7 miles off route, but luckily most of it was downhill!

We were quickly breezing through the cute, albeit mostly abandoned, downtown of Sonora, then out into some open, beautifully flat farmland.  It was just like home!  

We breezed through the first part of our day, and quickly arrived at a little store at a fork in the road, and stopped in looking for a cold drink.  We found a really nice family inside - mom, dad, and daughter - and ended up buying drinks, and sitting and talking with them for about an hour and a half before we remembered we needed to move on down the road.  Their place is called the Double L Grocery, and they also let cyclists stay there at the store  (and even teach some German cyclists how to play softball!).  They have plans to turn a shed in the back into a cyclist hostel, and mom even ended up buying an abandoned school building, which they used to let cyclists stay in until someone stole the electrical out of it.  What a bummer - these are really good people!

Of course, not too long after that stop, we ran into a ridiculously steep uphill after a river...

The terrain was pretty up and down after that - the same rolling hills we will undoubtedly find all across Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri.  It wasn't too long before we hit another milestone - crossing from Eastern Standard Time to Central Time!  This happened at a random county line in Kentucky:

It got really, really hot and humid around mid-afternoon, and as we stopped to rest in the shade of a lovely tree (few and far between in farm country), we heard meowing, and this cutie came out of the brush near a farm:

 Seems to be someone's very friendly barn cat - he was trying to climb Mel's leg and join us on the trip!

We got closer to the Rough River and lake created by the dam, and the road got quite a bit hillier.  We powered up the last few of them, and coasted in to the Rough River State Park campground a bit after 6.  We set up camp, found some left behind firewood, and tried unsuccessfully to start a campfire, but everything was utterly too damp from the humidity.  

The park office was closed when we arrived, and when we left in the morning, so we snuck through with a free campsite (with electricity!) and shower for the night!