Blue Ridge Parkway

[lumberjim]

Background:

One night early this summer, Amanda and I went over to the Blue Monkey Tavern for dinner. She had, on her agenda, for us to decide where and when we were going for vacation this year. Among the other ideas, a long motorcycle ride down the mountains to visit my dad was offered up, and ultimately settled upon. Plans began.

The motorcycle situation was assessed and found wanting. We have done day trips to the beach with just my old flop over saddle bags and a backpack strapped to the sissy bar, but a week long ride with 2 of us was going to require a few upgrades. I had just ordered the Corbin seat, and had decided the old saddle bags were not going to work anyway, so I started looking into bigger bag options. I like the flat black of the leather, so I went with the XL Hammer style Viking bags. I had to paint the red on the piping to make them match... Also got that BIG Backpack for the sissy bar. Saddlemen. It hooks on relatively easily and securely.... Has a bajillion pockets that lock, and a rain fly in the top pocket that you deploy when you're being rained on. It works.



Starting off in Coatesville on Saturday morning... Planned to leave by 9 am... I woke up at 4 Am... Going over the contents of each storage area on the motorcycle.... I had replaced both tires, front and rear brakes, oil change, new rear turn signals to accommodate the larger saddle bags....I knew we were ready , but I was still up until 5:30 fretting.... dozed until 7:14 and that was all I could bear. UP!

Two long hours later...packed, fed, and all fogged up from the cloud that had settled in overnight, we embarked. It was 9:11 am as we pulled out of Amanda's lot.

We took Pa 340 West to Lancaster, picked up rte 30 and rode that out to York. Bypassing York on 30, get rte 15 south at Gettysburg. Once over the Pa Md border, the surface of the highway was stripped up for repaving. It's not at ALL fun to ride a motorcycle on that type of surface. We ducked out in Emmitsburg and took the business route, but that put us right back on the nurled highway 5 miles south. I just had to white knuckle it until it was through. I think it was a million miles (15) until we got passed that mess.

Fast forward to Front Royal. At this point I realized that I had not put sun screen on because it was so gloomy when we left, and so cool out, that I didn't feel it until we stopped. So... find a pharmacy and procure sunscreen and something with lidocaine in it. We found a cool little tavern to have lunch, and then set out to tackle the Skyline Drive. We've ridden 177 miles at this point... Skyline is 110 miles... and it's 35 mph. So it is said to take 3 1/2 hours to ride. We got on it at 3pm



The sun had set at 8pm as we got off.....


Here's a video I made.... the speed is accelerated in places... I'm not actually riding that fast.