Day 18

Left last nights accommodation after a hearty breakfast of pancakes, bacon and syrup. Still in Virginia ( it goes on forever), still climbing hills. Virginia consists of nothing but hills ( they are small, medium, large and very large. Today we climbed two very large, which we all managed with comparative ease, we must be getting fitter, 55 miles today.
We are cycling through the back of beyond or as one local called it "god's own country". Hillbilly country; more than once a local has said, "you watch them boys out on the road, those there hillbillies don't know how to drive", not sure whose talking about who, when said by a man in dungarees and a straw hat.
There is very little on route, a garage with food of sorts every 10-20 miles, restaurants even rarer, motels, seen one today, campsites, seen none. We are camping tonight in the town park of 'council'. The town consists of a few hundred people, no shop or anything else, but allows camping in the park. The services available are a picnic table and a stream, had a bath of sorts in the stream, quite pleasant.
Locals are keen to chat, interested in where we are going or have come from. It takes getting used to that a lot of the people we speak to, have very little experience of anywhere else.
A school bus came alongside us today full of teenagers. They were shouting out the window"where yo'al cum from?" When we said England they seemed astounded that we had turned up in their town of Honaker and shouted, how did you find Honaker? My response, on a map. Is Honaker on a map? Was there question, and I think they were serious. A woman we spoke to today, who was about my age, had only been out of Virginia once, let alone out of the country and thought the UK was the same size as the USA.
Our host last night David, ex chief of police in Tennessee, grown the beard since. Accommodation required Christopher and Martin to be friendlier than expected.