October 17
What a lazy morning! Nobody seemed to want to get out of bed on this beautiful Sunday! But people slowly trickled downstairs and gravitated towards the kitchen. A pot of coffee got started, and Eric got involved in the cooking, serving some killer garlic-and-chili-pepper scrambled eggs. We slowly moved out to the bikes, where Drew, the oldest son, begged me for a ride on the FJR. I obliged, and then took Evan, the middle son, on a ride around the yard while Drew chased us. We finally got on the road about noon.
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Today’s goal was to re-trace some of yesterdays route, then peel off of I 40 northward on 421, and jump on the Blue Ridge Parkway at Deep Gap. We left the Piedmont behind and climbed back up into the mountains. Just before we hit the Parkway, we passed a grey FJR going the other way, 2 up. The temperature dropped dramatically as we climbed up out of Deep Gap up to Thompkins Knob. My thermometer showed a balmy 75. It met it's fate in a trash can at a turnout. The fall colors were really heating up as we pressed on to the north.
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If you have never been on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I recommend it. Even in a car, it is fun, and on a bike, it’s great. It only has one problem. The speed limit. 45 miles an hour. For over 400 miles. Solution? Let Eric lead. We had a lot of fun.
Actually, the Parkway has two problems. The second one is vandalism. I noticed that many of the signs at the overlooks were damaged, dented, scratched, and spray painted. What is it with people in the east? The western parks don’t look like this! Maybe the western parks just don’t get the traffic that the eastern ones do. Maybe park rangers should be allowed to shoot vandals on sight.
We also had another great idea. You always hear on the news that the National Parks are under-funded. I have always thought that the Parks are too cheap…many of the Parks that we visited on this trip didn’t even charge admission, yet they were asking for donations. Well, for the Blue Ridge, we came up with the perfect fund-raiser. A couple of weekends each year, they should section off about 100 miles of the Parkway, make it one-way, and suspend the speed limit. You would have to sign a liability waiver and show proof of insurance before they would let you on the road. They could probably charge $500 a head and have all the people they could handle! Plus, it would be a gold mine for the towing companies, pulling all of those motorcycles out of the trees.
Around 5PM, we decided that if we wanted to avoid the troubles of a few nights ago, we had better start looking for a room. We were just south of the Virginia line, and I 77 was just on the other side of the border, so we figured that would be a good stopping place. We found a Days Inn at Fancy Gap, a convenience store that sold beer on Sunday, and a great little local place called the Lakeview Inn. There wasn’t a lake anywhere around, but we had a couple of fine steaks served by a cute waitress with a good sense of humor. We topped it off with blackberry cobbler…Eric skipped the ice cream on his, so he could tell Linda that he stuck to his diet.
Stats: 219 miles, moving average 50 MPH, moving time 4.16, average speed 34, maximum speed 79