Left right from work on Friday afternoon, got to Maggie Valley around 7:00... it was around 95
when I left, and magnificent on the Blue Ridge Parkway... too bad pictures flatten things,
there's so many layers and so much depth to the view from up there on a good day...
I snapped this picture of Hal with my little goPro camera as we were all leaving from Maggie Valley...
We've stayed in this cool old 1960s style motel a few times, it is clean and the folks that own it
are nice...
When I forget to turn off the goPro at stops, it turns into spy cam...
We dropped off the parkway around 2:00 at Boone or Blowing Rock... near Tweetsie
Railroad... and got lunch. My "well used" tires and OEM shocks with 70,000 Stanley Steamer
miles on them made for some strange reactions tooling down the curvy heavily-trafficked
under-construction road into town. I think both wheels broke loose at one point... maybe
it was squirrely for everyone going down that hill... the way it was down to the
crosshatched road base in some places and a two or three inch lip up to new pavement
in the next lane amid all that traffic was pretty intense after the ease of the parkway...
It wasn't too far from there to the meet in the middle motel...
meet in the middle is a great
concept, you get to meet up with VRCCrs from far away that you don't see often... Yuri and Petra
were there...
John Goodman Skinhead was there all the way from Michigan... Jess from Va...
3fan who was one of the ones who set all this up... I traded Lady Draco a crummy old brake lever cover
for a jar of her home-made blackberry preserves...
Here's the meet in the middle parking lot at dawn Sunday morning...
You can always get people to smile if you ask them if they are in the witness protection program
before you snap the shutter...
Well... maybe not Detn8er... I better not post the picture I tried to sneak of him polishing his
motorcycle...
he's quicker than the shutter's snap.
There's lots more curves on the BRP than on the Natchez Trace
There must be six or seven of these tunnels between Asheville and Brevard... Wimp
never gets tired of blowing his horn all the way through them
I remember thinking this was a cool looking motorcycle when we passed it... maybe
it would just look like the typical sports bike from the side... I don't really know what it
is...
Short hair plus Shoei vents equals naturally curly hair... everyone else called them
corn rows...
Me and Paul and Randy all needed to go in the same general direction to get home,
so we used the parkway to get back... we hit heavy rain at Grandfather mountain,
and by Craggy Gardens you couldn't see your hand in front of your face from the fog or clouds
we were riding through, and Paul didn't have his windshield on for this ride... he and Randy still
boogied on down the hill faster than me, and then we gassed up and ate in Asheville. It seemed
to clear up some, so we continued on the parkway (instead of the steaming holiday traffic in
Asheville and the surrounding major hiways). The weather seemed like it was
going to be OK, so I stayed on the parkway all the way to the Brevard exit, they
continued on to Maggie Valley (that was their plan, anyhow) and points south.
I discovered that 276 down to Brevard is a traffic nightmare on a holiday, and that I
should have gone down to the next BRP exit... 215... Rain picked up again in Brevard,
and I made it on home safe... hope everyone's got back OK, and can't wait till next time,
whenever that is... Fall Color Ride I guess...
-Mike
