Today is Pat’s birthday! I’m sure she would love it if you would send her an email to say Happy Birthday!

Today was another shorter ride. We did just 50 miles to Toccoa. I’m hoping three days of shorter rides will get me feeling recovered and ready to face the next couple of weeks where we ride through the Appelachian mountains.

Here’s a couple photos of the country roads I took to get to Toccoa.

It was nice riding today. Only a couple short stretches of busy road near Athens and then a very short stretch of road construction where the road was narrowed to one lane and we were escorted through the construction zone by a pilot car. Well, I should say that the automobiles were escorted, but I couldn’t keep up (obviously). It turned out to actually be a nice stretch of road to ride because I knew there would be no traffic coming from either direction.

The terrain is getting more hilly. Toccoa’s official elevation is 1017 feet, by the way, so we’ve already come up about 800 feet since we were in Florida just a week ago. I’m still just riding through hills, but today, I saw something definitely resembling a mountain. It’s Currahee Mountain and at 1740 feet, it is quite visible for miles around Toccoa. The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers, features Currahee Mountain in its opening scenes because there was a WWII paratrooper training camp based there. I couldn’t find a photo of the actual Currahee Mountain, but there’s a web site about the paratrooper camp, if you’re interested in learning more.

Toccoa has a “Welcome to Toccoa sign as you enter town. As it turns out, Toccoa is the birthplace of Paul Anderson, who won a gold medal in the 1956 Olympics.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 2:42 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.