Last year me and Stanley Steamer rode across South Carolina to a farm near Edgefield where
everything is good... we went for peaches, and we stopped all along the way and talked to people
and read all the hysterical plagues...
http://www.valkyrieforum.com/bbs/index.php?topic=7293.0I've been getting plenty of good peaches at the farmers market, so I don't really need to go
anywhere for peaches, but there's something about making a
peach run on Valkyries
that negates logic, so I sent out a email to four or five nearby Valkyrie riders to meet me at
McDonalds in Pickens at 8:30 this morning for a peach run... Dennis showed up and his son-in-law
and granddaughter LeAnne showed up on a Triumph Tiger.
The "peach area" of the Upstate is all along hwy. 11 in Greenville and Spartanburg counties... they
even have this out on I85 where hwy. 11 ends...
So we headed for some peach farms out near where hwy. 14 connects to hwy. 11... but this is a
Valkyrie ride, not just a peach run, so we had to use some good roads... hwy. 11 is fine on a brisk
fall day, but it's just an oppressive trafficky slog through the woods on a 100 degree day like today. We
went down some side roads that were curvy and traffic free and went all the way from Pickens to
Cleveland without touching hwy. 11. Then we blasted down the fast sweeper (not so bad) part of hwy. 11
from Cleveland to a great curvy road that leads to the Poinsett Bridge... I didn't have the onboard
camera today, this shot is representative of many of the roads we used...
Here we are parked at Poinsett Bridge, on the 200 year old "road" from Greenville to Asheville...
Here's Poinsett Bridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poinsett_Bridge designed by
South Carolina's own Joel Poinsett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Poinsett
LeAnne (14 or 15, remember when you were 14 or 15?) decided it would be cool to scramble up this
hill and look around.
She built up a head of steam on the way down, and when she got to the bottom she tripped and
fell on some rocks (she's OK). I'm glad, from a legal perspective, that Dennis was shooting a movie
of her when she fell, when he and her Dad were helping her to the side after she fell it looked like they
were "hiding the body"
She's a soldier, she didn't want to go home, she wanted to keep going on
the planned ride, she likes the curvy roads... her Dad wrapped her wrist and got her some
Advil (or something) and some antibacterial spray when we got up to Saluda NC...
We went through the Greenville watershed and down some really good roads I'd never been on
before, sort of North of Glassy Mountain and South of the three little towns, Saluda, Tryon and
Landrum. Stopped for a bite to eat in Tryon... shoulda ate in Saluda, coulda got a milkshake there
I succumbed to the temptation to ride without my Joe Rocket, and tried out one of those
evaporative cooling vests that Jess from Va was talking about a month or so ago... it seemed pretty
nice in the coolness of the shady mountain roads around the Greenville watershed, but by the time
it got to be 100 and we were heading home in the sun on 11, it was hot...
Finally, the purpose of the trip... got a saddlebag full of peaches. Dennis got two saddlebags full of
peaches. And they have awesome peach slushys at the farm shed we stopped at.
I lost a lot of the peaches to bruising last year, so we did most of our riding first, and
then went home on less aggressive (hwy. 11 and stuff) roads...
-Mike
