Roadside dangers!!!

Day 33 - The alarm woke us up at 7:00 AM, but we were not anxious to start traveling with temperatures in the 30's.  We relaxed watching TV and finally got on the road at 10:00 AM.  With the opportunity for so many roadside attractions behind us now, we had a high mileage day planned.  We still had to deal with a north wind, but since we were heading west now, it was not head on and we made good time averaging 11.6 mi/hr today.  The only things that slowed us down was Geri getting attacked by a roadside bear and a front flat tire.  Geri said she caused the flat because she had just thought how great it was that we had not had a flat tire in quite a while.  The sharp, metal beer can fragment that I found embedded in the tire, however, did not look like a superstition to me!  Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am very competitive, so one of the highlights of the day for me was when we actually caught a moving train and started passing the cars one by one.  This continued for some time, even as we crossed a bridge over the Tennessee River.  The highway we had to travel on today had moderately heavy traffic all day.  The shoulder would vary from a magnificent 15 foot wide runway to a 1 foot ribbon with half of it covered with 2 inch deep rumble strips.  We never knew how long a good or bad section of the shoulder would last, but we sure enjoyed traveling on the wider one rather than having to focus every second of attention following a narrow 6 inch track.  We arrived at a nice motel in Huntingdon, TN.  just before 6:00 PM, of course, compared to the motel we stayed at last night anything else would have been nice!  We covered 67.5 miles today and our bike passed its 19,000th lifetime mile.