Wednesday, Day 3, 62 miles

We leave camp about the usual time, and head back across the Spillway towards the Trace. Wanting to avoid the traffic we had experienced on the way in, we luckily find a woman on a bike, and, surprisingly, manage to catch her! She takes along a bike trail that we would have never found and leads us to the Reservoir Overlook, which is one of the stops right on the Trace. Some of the trail turns out to be the Clinton bike trail that Hunter saw yesterday and we would end up using tomorrow to avoid the Jackson traffic.  We travel about 15 miles north on the Trace along the reservoir, so the scenery is pleasant and, fortunately the lake breeze is a crossing one. We stop at River Bend at the bottom of the Pearl River which feeds the reservoir , and experience firsthand the horrors of the Sequester, the bathrooms are closed Wednesday through Friday (note to self: they will not be open on the way back, either) Fortunately, they left the drinking fountains on and the lack of a bathroom was not really a problem for males. We cover the next 20 miles to Red Dog Road, named for a Choctaw Chief, uneventfully, but the miles and the heat are beginning to take their tool. The next 15 miles to the Holly Hill picnic area are a struggle, and the last 6 to the Kosciusko Visitor Center are a Bataan Death March kind of ride that seems to take forever. We enter the visitor center and the woman working there has no idea about the bikes-only campground we got from the NPS site. She calls around and tells us it’s about ¼ mile back down the road at the maintenance office. We find it and note that there is already someone camped there (we have seen only two people that are bike packing so far). Turns out to be an “interesting” character, Tom, heading from Deland, Fl to the Dakotas with his dog, Scruffy, in a trailer and about 100 pounds of gear.  Later, a guy named Noah shows up traveling south from the beginning of the Trace in Nashville. We ride a couple miles into the town of Kosciusko for some beer and provisions. Noah, being your typical Millennial, uses his solar-charged IPhone to check the weather satellite and it looks like some nasty stuff is headed our way. We manage to avoid the rain, but get a lightning strike about 100 yards away that has us checking our drawers. Hunter and I walk a short distance to an Italian restaurant and have an excellent pizza, aptly named “The Almighty”.