Ron's Tour of the Southland - Stage 1 - Tour de London RR course

Our family just completed a vacation to Florida. We drove and took our time getting down there so we made stops at some pretty cool locations. I of course took my bike and woke up early a lot of the mornings to take in some great riding. I called this "Ron's Tour of the Southland." It consisted of 7 stages in the states of Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, and Tennesee.

This is the first installment of ride reports.

Stage 1 in London, Kentucky.

67.1km

2:07:33

One of my wife’s best friends from high school now lives in London, KY. Since it’s generally on the way we decided that the first night we would stay there. Every September, London is the home to the Kentucky State Road Race and Criterium Championships. The road race start/finish is downtown but the course is held on a 40 mile loop out in the country. After driving in circles a little bit I found a great place to park at the high school about a mile from where the ciricuit starts.

What made this ride so enjoyable is that I didn’t need to pull out my route maps once during the whole ride because the course is well marked with route markers painted on the road. I normally spend about 15-20 minutes of my vacation rides stopped looking at maps trying to figure out where I am. This would have been a nightmare because of the many turns of this course and the fact that rural Kentucky seems especially bad at not having street signs at every intersection. Actually it seemed that I should have been doing the route in reverse since the roads seemed to be labeled when I was turning off of them but not when I was getting on.

This course is almost always rolling and turning. There were I think 3 or 4 main climbs but only 1 of them put me in my 27 tooth cog. The rest were about like the Braeburn Rd. climb in Barrington Hills but longer.

After riding this I am calling this my favorite race even though I haven’t raced it. The course is wonderful and would be a blast to race. For all you mountain goats out there this would be especially fun. My guess is the last real climb on this circuit would be my undoing but I still would like to do this. There’s also a crit the same weekend which is pretty flat so it would make for a great weekend of racing. The drive is under 8 hours so why not make a nice weekend of it?

I had never been to this part of Kentucky so this was my first time seeing some of the more rural parts of the south. What I found the most interesting was the number of churches out here. It seemed like there was a church every mile or 2, even way out in the middle of nowhere. Most are Baptist or Pentacostal and ranged from very small church buildings to trailer homes in very poor condition.

You can see the route and pictures at the race website here. One year I am definitely going to be making the trip down there to do these races.