Day 2 - Ashland, Virginia

Got up early today and was on the bike at 6:30.
It was unusually cool and I expected it to heat up within one hour. Didn't happen. It stayed relatively cool all day long. "Relatively" meaning compared to yesterday. The sun was covered by clouds every now and then and it wasn't as humid as the day before.
Speaking of which, it was brutal. Relative humidity up to 90%, even locals told me that's extreme. I had 40+ °C in the Central valley of California and the Sahara desert but that was doable because it was a dry type of heat.
What made it much easier today was a cool breeze, first time ever I was happy about headwinds!
Had the street for myself the first few hours which was quite nice, although drivers have been really fair so far.

What's a problem however is that there are hardly any campgrounds in this area and wild camping is virtually impossible since all the land along the road is someone's yard. Didn't expect Virginia to be that densely populated.
So I ended up in a hotel again for tonight. Doing that frequently is over my budget but other cyclists told me that there are gonna be lots of campgrounds once I'm over the Appalchians. In the Great Plains all the little towns let you camp in their city park, school yard or firehouse for free and out in the west wild camping is no problem at all.
That'll drop my daily spending average.

By the way: not only lodging is rare, also food and water. You better not run out of water at 30+°C when there's nothing for the next 20 miles. Got into that situation in California last year. That experience teached me what great luxury it is to have unlimited water available at every house, a good we usually don't recognize because it underlies no limitation in developed countries...

Besides that, not much to say about the route today. It's a green state, I've mentioned that before. Hundreds of nicely built churches everywhere! Towns with 30.000 people got at least 10, for every thinkable type of believe.

I've met the fourth Transam-buddy today. First one was yesterday, he was on his last day towards Yorktown. Today I met two guys dragging two fully packed trailers and a dog. They're doing really slow and allow themselves six months. Later I met another guy on his final days to Yorktown.

Need to get an early start tomorrow, if I'm not gonna do 140km I need to wild camp...