TRAVEL'N ALONG AT A LEISURELY PACE--
Two samples; one with and one without a throttle

We combined bicycles and geocaching on our first outing shortly after returning to OH from FL snowbirding with this perfect, sunny day ride on the Kokosing Gap Trail out of Mt. Vernon.  Seven new hides were there along the way to Gambier and we got all seven in our tune-up outing.

We even added one that had previously eluded us at the Brown Environmental Center down near Kenyon College.  That one had two stages.  First we parked the bikes and hiked a very steep hill to a pine woods up behind the office building.  That little cache container simply had a piece of paper which told us the latitude and longitude of where the final stage was located--also high on the hill.

Sue (above) is enjoying the tranquility of the Kokosing River as it ripples and gurgles beneath the railroad bridge a few miles downriver from the trail head as we rode back toward town.  That's her blue, Sun recumbent tricycle in the foreground and my orange Sun, two-wheel ride in the rear.

Just a few days earlier we trundled leisurely home from our four-month stay in Vero Beach by avoiding the interstate highways as much as possible.  What a marvelous experience which left me wondering why we hadn't done that earlier.

We probably added about a half-day, maybe less, to our travel time in exchange for tranquility similar to our bike ride above on the vast majority of highway miles we traveled.

Gone was the insanity of 75 MPH traffic hanging on our bumper while that driver yacked unconcernedly on it's cell phone.

We traded that roaring scrum of inhumanity for nostalgic sights of the deep south that are blurred into invisibility at super highway speeds.  We traveled mile after mile on sparsely populated, often four-lane highways that once were the mainstays of north-south auto travel.

We hopped on US 23 in the Asheville, NC area, for example, and hopped off in Chilocothe.  We did that to avoid the insanity of Columbus traffic by sliding quietly through Lancaster, Granville and Mt. Vernon.

And, of course, we stopped often to geocache along the way.  That's Sue below on a rainy afternoon in Kingsport, TN where we booked our motel room in mid-afternoon and decided to enjoy the local sights.  She's bending under her white umbrella and pushing into the weedy undergrowth for this cache she found about 50 feet further on. 

How did I manage to avoid this mild downpour while she soldiered on?  Don't know, now that I think about it.  But, such things happen when the fun of the journey exceeds the urge to rocket home on the super highways.