Our two alarms went off at 3:30am this morning in our motel room. We were trying to make up for lost miles and time yesterday with the whole park ranger incident. The pack up was quick we were able to ride away at 4:30am south on rt. 340. It was dark, real dark and we made good time on the 80 or so miles to Waynesboro, here we fueled up and got lost for 13 miles until getting direction to head back on the road we came from. We were looking for the Blue Ridge Parkway and it was so dark out that we had driven right by the massive mountain range. But by 7:30 we were on the ridgeline watching the sunrise making ourselves oatmeal and tea, grinning. By 8am we were back on the bikes cruising south on the top of the world. This road is by far one of the best roads I have ever been on with the bike, this is not saying much but I think most bikers would agree.
Because of today I have finally named my bike, I have been thinking about it for a few days but was not sure. After taking winding curving roads at 50 mph in 3rd gear it is official, she is Asian and purrs like a tiger so her name can be none other than Jasmin and oh man was that tiger a pleasure to ride today. The trick is to not use your breaks at all only using the throttle at high RPMs to adjust the speed in the turns. It was hard to focus on the road with such amazing views all day long,
After doing 250 miles by 11:30am we had lunch, we had been on the bike for many hours and stopped for some soup, break, brie cheese and some sunshine. It was glorious. Colin made some phone calls I did a little reading and we hung out for about 2 hours.
It was 1:30 by the time Jasmin was purring again. We were both getting worn out and the roads were not as amazing as before, though they were amazing winding roads through green fields with wide turns running along streams. It was one of these streams we stopped at that had been dammed where we realized out original plan was a bit ambitious, not that we couldn’t complete it but we would rather find a place to camp early and have a nice relaxed night after our long day. We decided to take rt. 58 west towards the Appellation mountains and find a campground there. Our first stop was a RV park that was not appetizing at all, but the owner said that there was a biker campground down the road that might still be open. We toured the RV park then went to have a look at the biker campground and not to our surprise it was closed. We parked our bikes and had a walk around finding the owner, Will, working on his bike. We chatted for a little while and he offered us a place to stay on his land free of charge even though he closed a month before our arrival. We were delighted to enter the NO CARS gate and take our first step into the biker campground world. We are the only ones here now, writing this, eating soup and bread, listening to Phish drinking PBR and enjoying the warm night weather knowing that in the morning we will start this all over again. I now sign off heading into the tent and into the dream world of my sleeping bag.
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