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After a nice, cool night in the hollow, woke to cloudy skies feeling like rain. Packed the tent, up the hill to Fort Boonesborough, a reconstruction(?) of the original 1775 fort that features reenactors doing period crafts and chores.
Skipped the tour and drove eight miles to Richmond, home of a big old courthouse with Civil War history.
I asked someone on the street and was directed to a downtown bakery for breakfast of biscuits and gravy and eggs, with a warm apple turnover for the road. Out of town running southeast on 421 through good sized mountains, began to rain, cleared enough to see Pilot Knob.
then rain again through Bighill (yes there is one), Clover Bottom, Gray Hawk, Egypt, and Burning Springs, all very small, not much left,
past more simple brick roadside churches - I think there has been a Baptist church every ten miles along the highway all through Missouri and Kentucky
through slightly larger Manchester in the rain down Hwy 11 through Bimble and Flat Lick in the rain to Middlesboro, aka “Magic City.” I didn't see much magic downtown, just another town like so many across Missouri and Kentucky that once had good times and now times have passed them by. I did learn later that Middlesboro is the only city in the country built in a meteor crater, so perhaps the magic is there waiting to be unleashed.
Out of town a mile to the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, rain, toured the few exhibits, picked up a map and drive to a high, scenic overlook, scenic at least o days when clouds and fog aren't sitting low on the mountains.
Determined to walk in the Path of Daniel Boone, I drove down to a trail head and walked in the rain up over Cumberland Gap
then back down a mile on the Wilderness Road,
passed Indian Rock, there in Danls day
and down a section including a section of the original road pretty much as it is when it was finally widened in the 1790's to accommodate wagons.
The highway used to run through the gap but was replaced by a road in 1996 and in 2002 the Park Service carried out a major project to remove the road and return the area to something like the original landscape. Wet enough, I drove back down the mountain in the rain
back to the Visitor's Center where I had a nice talk with two men tending a mud-shelled charcoal kiln, preparing for blacksmitihing and other doings there on the weekend. Drove a couple of miles north in Virginia to the campground where it was empty and quiet, except for the rain on the van all through the night.
