I'm not going to bother talking extensively about Deals Gap. We all know it, many of us have ridden it, and the rest of us want to ride it. Last time I came through it was on my Virago, and now with a slightly more sporty bike and some track days under my belt, I wanted to give it another shot.

Even though Deals Gap specifically is famous for it's twists, the whole area for miles in any direction is full of sportbike roads, and great views.





I had planned on linking up with a goon at the resort, but I arrived the better part of two hours late due to being delayed by the construction on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We chatted a while, and I took the luggage and hardbags off the Wee to go and have some fun.

And I promptly turned in what is probably one of the sloppiest runs ever seen on the Gap.

I'd honestly forgotten just how scary that road actually is, especially when you don't know it. This combined with the fact that I'd already done 300 miles or so that day made me all over the place. I was tired and sore and just a mess. I was on and off the gas in the middle of corners, I was completely crossed up, I was over the DY a number of times and was generally a squiddy disaster waiting to happen. After the first run, my goon friend (appropriately) chastised me for being a moron, and I at least slowed the fuck down and just tried to enjoy the road. At least as best you can, even with little traffic and no cops, the road still makes me shiver. And with no leaves on the trees, you could really see just how far down the cliff you can fall if you fuck something up.



I very much did not want to end up adding to the collection on the Tree of Shame.



Whenever someone crashes their bike on the road, they are required by tradition to leave a part of their bike in the tree. Many of the bits of plastic and metal have short descriptions of the event written on them, and a disturbing amount say "RIP"



We spent that night at the resort, where I introduced my dad to the series "The Long Way Round". I know he keeps insisting that he's fine with bicycles, but I SWEAR I'm going to get him on a motorcycle someday.



The next day dawned cold, and drizzly. Looking at the radar there was rain in almost all directions, so there wasn't much choice but to gear up and deal with it.



The goal was to make it over to the start of the Natchez Trace Parkway, which starts just south of Nashville and would run almost all the way down to the coast. There wasn't a whole lot in the way of great riding to get there, and even then it was too wet and cold to enjoy it much anyway. We burned miles west on smaller roads, starting mostly dry but hitting more and more patches of rain, until finally it was just a constant heavy rain. Didn't bother taking any pictures of it, because what motorcyclist really wants to look at pictures of cold rain?

We did stop at a little diner place for breakfast at around 11am. This place exuded sophistication and class, as indicated most strongly by the fact that their idea of napkins was a roll of paper towels on every table.



Mmm, calories!

That night we stayed in some motel that looked like it was going to be a gross fleabag, but was surprisingly clean given the low rate. The next day dawned much nicer, cool and sunny, and we headed onto the Natchez Trace Parkway.



This parkway roughly traces the route of one of the common trails used by Native Americans to travel from the gulf coast up into the midwest. It's not particularly mountainous, nor does it have any of the twists of the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it's a wonderful road none the less.



The road is incredibly peaceful, spending most of it's time in the forest, and while it's not twisty at all, rarely is it ever straight and spends most of it's time very slowly winding it's way over gentle hills and through the beautiful fall trees. Occasionally it pops out into clearings of farms or grasslands, before sliding back through clumps of trees.



It was so incredibly peaceful. No billboards, no towns, little traffic, few exits, nothing to break the serenity save for the occasional scenic view or informational/historic pull off.

It was also one of the smoothest roads I have EVER been on, especially the northern bits part. Not a single ripple, crack, NOTHING at all. It was almost unsettling just how completely smooth the bike was, it felt like you were riding along on a cloud, you couldn't feel the road under you. It was amazing. I think this road would be perfect to take a literbike on and blast along at 150mph. Enough changes in direction to be interest, but never any real corners, excellent sight lines at all times, and buttery smooth pavement.

One of the informational pull-offs advertized a section of the origional Natchez Trace. Modern engineering standards meant that it wasn't possible to follow the origional route exactly for many sections, but there were some little gravel road bits that followed the path as closely as possible.





And the nice thing about having a chase vehicle is you have someone to act as camera bitch :)



We stopped in some little town just off the Parkway for lunch at a buffet, that was actually really good considering it only cost $6. Not included is a picture of the enormous family of hambeasts that was sitting at the table next to us. I couldn't get a good enough sneaky shot.



My dad was out of vacation time, so at this point he had to turn back north. We said our goodbys, and as I was backing out of the parking space . . .



Thanks, dad. Thanks for your first reaction being to grab the camera, rather then help me wake the bike up from it's little nap.

I headed down the parkway for another few hours, and once the shadows started getting long I looked for someplace to camp. I spied what looked like a small trail leading off into the forest and followed it with . . . predictably stupid results.



GODDAMIT IF BRUTE FORCE DOESN'T WORK YOU'RE NOT USING ENOUGH.

Eventually I got the bike back there, and set up for the night.



Getting the bike back out in the morning didn't go too well, either.



I road the rest of the Trace that day, ending in the town of Natchez where I got a pretty damn great pizza at a little italian place. It was so filling that I was only able to finish half of a fairly small pizza, so the rest went into the saddlebags for dinner.



I continued west, getting into Texas and heading up to one of the National Forests in search of a place to camp. Unfortunetly, it was deer hunting season and I felt that primitive camping somewhere randomly was a good plan to get shot, so I ended up saying in one of the areas designated for hunters.



There wasn't much to note the next day, save for . . .



Well, shit. 77 in a 70, got off with a warning. Hooray!

Real-time update

I'm in a tiny town in West Texas called Sanderson, at a campground that has Wi-fi. I'm actually sitting in the laundry shed typing this, because I forgot to charge my laptop while on the bike and opened it to find the battery dead. And the signal in the shed here is so weak that there is literally a 6" area that I need to have the laptop in for it to work, so I'm sitting on one of the washers with the laptop balanced precariously on a window sill.

I've actually failed completely at stealth camping both of the last two nights (hell, for most of this trip), everything in Texas is surrounded by barb wire fences and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs.

I'm toying with checking out Big Bend National Park, and after that I'll be heading up to Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. Looking forward to getting to NM and AZ, there's a wealth of National Forests up there, and basically none in West Texas.

Lets see, things to note over the last few days:

-Stayed with a friend in Austin, and the ginormous pair of breasts that he's married to
-Met up with goon at an IHOP for coffee and a few hours of me talking about myself (sorry if I came across as self-centered)
-Replaced the rear wheel bearings and front tire on my Wee. Although now that I look at it I might need a rear tire soon too. Crap. Why do I insist on running soft sport rubber on my dual-sport bike?
-Road the Three Sisters in Texas. Holy crap, roller coaster roads! Came over some hills with enough speed that the bike scraped stuff on the ground when it settled back onto the suspension
-Got a fleece liner for my sleeping bag. OMG LUXURY I HAVE NEVER KNOWN YOU BEFORE.
-Discovered that the PO of my Olympia suit had seam-sealed all of the vent zippers shut. SON OF A BITCH. Anyone know of a solvent that will dissolve this shit without fucking up the fabric/plastic?
-Been perfecting the "flat and mostly straight" riding position on my bike:



(throttle lock on, leaning back on the seat bag with my left foot on the crash bar, right foot on the dashboard, and the buckle of my boot wedged against the master cylinder so I can control the direction of the bike by flexing my leg. It's heavenly when the shoulders are starting to get sore)

New River Gorge and Blue Ridge Parkway

The place we had done the Zip Line adventure was in the New River Gorge, famous for the annual "Bridge Day" event where BASE jumpers and rappellers are permitted to use the bridge's 876 foot height above the river below for their enjoyment. It's a very scenic bridge, in a very pretty area.




(Usually I would use Photoshop magic to fill in the black, but there's just too much information to try and generate, it looked lousy)



My dad, who at this point is so old that he would drop dead if he tried to act his age, took the opportunity to show off that even though he's old, he's still a gymnast.





There was a little one-way road, what I'm assuming was the old way of getting across the gorge before the big bridge was built, that goes down to the base of the gorge and across a small bridge to the other side. In addition to providing some neat pictures of the big bridge, it was also super-narrow and twisty and fun as hell :D




(I had to keep stopping to wait for my dad in his van. Stupid cages)

After doing the zip-line thing, we both headed down to Ashville for the night, by super-slab :( We were trying to make up time, and it was late by that time. Stupid me trying to have a schedule on a motorcycle trip.

After spending the night in a hotel in Ashville, and getting completely lost due to me not being able to see the GPS screen in my tank bag map pouch in direct sunlight, and then after a good chunk of the parkway being closed for construction, giving us a 40-mile detour, we finally found the Parkway and I finally finished this stupid long sentence.



Oh, parkway. How I less-then-three all of you.







Pictures of my bike in front of stuff!





Holy crap, me AND the bike next to stuff!



And, again, my dad being my dad. Yes, we get it, you're in much better shape then someone a third your age.




(Fortunately, I was able to convince him NOT to take an even ruder picture.)

The Blue Ridge Parkway spits you out at into the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, but that wasn't my big interest. It was stuff like this!



Most people reading this already know what's coming next, but for those who don't, the Great Smokey Mountains National Park's southern border is a little section of US 129, a road which has . . . special properties.

Shenandoah National Park

Most of Saturday, October 30th was spent burning miles along Rt 50 from Ohio into Virgina, trying to find an REI to exchange my leaking sleeping pad at. It was actually a pretty nice way to cross the states, alternating between slowly rolling farmland and some proper twisty bits.



I got to Fairfax well after dark, and after finding the REI to swap my sleeping pad and pick up a couple of basics, I just grabbed a hotel and ordered a pizza for the night. There went $100 up in smoke, but whatever, it was a long day and I was tired and sore. The pizza was big enough that it made for decent leftovers, and on the way out I raided the maid's cart for toiletries.



October 31st: I super-slabbed it out of Fairfax for an hour or so to get to Front Royal, a small town that serves as the start of Skyline Drive, and Shenandoah National Park.



Shenandoah National Park has a slightly more checkered history then the older parks out West. While the large and famous parks in the Rockies were largely uninhabited areas when they were designated as parks, Shenandoah was fully established in 1935 and most of it's land was previously under private ownership. The residents of the area were largely pushed out, sometimes by military force, and the state of Virgina used eminent domain laws to buy the land from them and donate it to the Federal Government.

While this is a morally complicated issue, the fact is that the area is very beautiful and fulfilled the government's goal of having a National Park that was more accessible to the bulk of the population that lived on the east coast. The chief feature of the park is Skyline Drive, a 100+ mile road that runs through the park, giving stunning views at many overlooks along the way.





Handheld shakey video! Available in HD, no less. I got lazy and used Youtube's Audioswap to throw in some generic instrumental music, as all you could hear on the video's soundtrack was deafening wind roar.


(I'm trying to figure out how to get it to start at a specific time, but it doesn't seem to be working. Fast-forward to about 1:40 for some of the more scenic stuff, the first bit is me just playing around with holding the camera low to the ground.)

Even though the parkway is only 100-something miles long, the speed limit for most of it is 35mph and the combination of other traffic and stunning views means you can't go much faster then that anyway.

Skyline Drive comes out of the park and turns into the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is essentially the same idea as Skyline Drive, only longer. It takes a meandering, 477-mile long route through the mountains, avoiding many towns and cities, serving it's single function of being a beautiful drive.

And I'm sure there's some out there who would disagree with me, but really it's the same thing as Skyline, only more. Personally I like the Blue Ridge Parkway a bit better then Skyline, I think the views are more rugged and look down on fewer farms and civilization, and more on the endless rolling ridges.





I took the Blue Ridge Parkway as far south as Roanoke, by which time it was late and the sun was gone. Like on my last trip, my dad used my motorcycle trip as an excuse to ditch work and tag along on my travels in his van. While it slows me down, it does mean that I can pull on the heartstrings and have him pay for everything. The plan had been for him to meet me in Ronanoke and then for us to continue down the BRP together, but then I came up with another way he could spend money on me.

Zip line adventures!



We went on a coarse that consisted of five total ziplines, this one being the longest at 1800 feet. Unfortunately the batteries in my GoPro didn't hold up for the other ziplines.

I know this is a short update, but I think that's it for now. These take a lot more time to write then you'd think, especially when you have my bad habit of taking a zillion pictures that I have to sort through and stitch together into nice panoramas (and then clean up in Photoshop because I'm anal like that)

Back to it

The week leading up to the trip was full of the usual checks and repairs that most bikes will need before setting off on the road for a long trip. I'd bought the bike ~9 months ago and since then had put 16,000 miles on it, and there were some consumables that needed to be replaced. A new chain was in order, and as long as I was in there I went up a tooth (to 16) on the front sprocket, for a slightly more relaxed cruising RPM.

The valves were also checked, and a screw that was found in my rear tire was fixed. As long as I had the rear tire off, I got about to making something that I should have done a while ago: A tool tube.



This bike has so much more storage then my old Virago that I'm not quite sure what to do with it all. I'm not taking my SLR camera on this trip, which reduces my load by a bit, but even looking at my bike as I set off it looked so un-cluttered. Maybe I should strap a bunch of extra crap to it, just for the hell of it.



Starting mileage:



The first day out was uneventful. I super-slabbed in east from Chicago heading for Detroit, catching some light rain along the way. By the time I got to Detroit it was 9pm, so I had dinner at a seafood place with a girl I'd met and then got a room at a Motel 6 for the night.

The next day was largely more super-slab, due south from Detroit. I realized that in my haste to leave I'd forgotten some camping supplies, so I hit up an Outdoor World for some basics.



Northern Ohio is your usual crap-fest of straight midwest roads, but once you get into the south-eastern bit, there was actually some pretty kick-ass roads around there. Could probably have had a lot of fun in that area if I'd explored more.



I kept pushing south until I made it to Wayne National Forest, and headed off down some ATV trails in search of a place to camp.



Compared to the places I took my Virago, off-roading even on a D/S bike that's as road-oriented as the V-strom was a joy.



Eventually I came to a trail junction that had just enough of a clearing for the tent, and I made camp for the night there.



A couple of ATVs and maybe a dirtbike went by at some point in the night, but overall it was peaceful. And COLD. My sleeping bag was warm enough, but I discovered that my sleeping pad had a leak and the night was almost completely sleepless, tossing and turning trying to get comfortable on what was basically gravel. The night was so cold that I woke up to a layer of ice on the inside of my tent from condensation, and a lot of frost to scrape off the bike's seat.



Besides a few packets of hot chocolate mix, I hadn't brought much in the way of food. I fixed that with a stop at Aldis for the staples of any motorcycle camping trip.



I was sore and from a night of no-sleeping on what was essentially gravel, and made it my top priority to find an REI to exchange my sleeping pad at. But it seems there wasn't a single REI in all of West Virginia; the closest one that was even vaugly along my route was in Fairfax, just outside of D.C. I burned miles all day there along Rt 50, which actually had some pretty good bits. It was cold, maybe 40 degrees during most of the day, but the sun was out and the road was nice. It could have been much worse.

By the time I got to Fairfax, and the REI, it was well past dark and I was famished. I got a hotel ($80/night, yeow), ordered a pizza, updated the internet quickly and went to sleep.

Unfortunetly, I think this is going to be it for this update. I've got a ton of videos and many more pictures I want to upload, but this hotel that I'm in (Just outside of Knoxville) has some super-shitty internet, and I've had enough trouble just getting the few pictures here uploaded. Let alone any chance of video.

I should be in Austin in a few days with some decent internet access, so there should be a big update then.

Oh god, mountains. I missed them so much.

I'm currently typing this from a hotel in Fairfax, Virginia. The connection here is lame and slow, too slow to realistically upload pictures, so they will have to come later.

Until I get a chance for a real update, here's the tl;dr version:

Thurs the 28th: Left Chicago. Super-slabbed it through light rain to Detroit, where I met a girl. Motel 6'ed it for the night.

Fri the 29th: Left Detroit, headed south through Ohio through some nasty crosswinds. Took the bike for some VERY light off-roading, found someplace to camp down an ATV trail in Wayne National Forest. Found out that my sleeping pad had a leak.

Sat the 30th: Started the day with ice on the inside of my tent, and heavy layer of frost on the bike. Headed east from Athens, Ohio, hoping to find an REI to exchange my sleeping pad at. Found that the closest one was in Virginia, so I burned miles along Rt 50 all day (which has some amazing stretches, BTW) and got to the REI in Fairfax, VA, around 6:30pm. Got a hotel for the night, which is where I am now.

Pics will come in the next few days. The plan now is to make my way down the Blue Ridge Parkway, to the Great Smokey Mountains.

Here we go again . . .

Last summer, I took a four-month long, 27,000 mile road trip, taking a wildly inappropriate bike into places it was never supposed to go. I posted about it here, and ended up wrapping all my blog posts into a single PDF for people to download for easier reading http://home.comcast.net/~tsaven/Linearblawg.pdf . Since then, I've been killing time in Chicago, working some proper 9-5 type jobs and generally trying to be a productive member of society.

It turns out that I'm not very good at that, so fuck it. I'm going back on the road.



I'm leaving today, and this time on a much more appropriate machine; my black '04 Wee-Strom. I spent the last week doing the usual wrenching on it; valve check, chain and sprockets, tool tube, etc. Compared to my Virago that I did my previous trip on, this bike has so much storage space I don't quite know what to do with it all.

Fall is almost over here in Chicago, so my goal is to get south as soon as I can. I want to get over to the Blue Ridge Parkway before it closes for the season, and then head down the Natchez parkway before heading across the South to the Trinity test site, and then to Death Valley. By this time, my money will probably have run out, but if I can I want to also make it up to the Giant Redwoods forest, because I <3 giant trees. At that point, I'll sell the bike (if I can. 75k+ on it, some trackdays and a couple of at-speed laydowns do not a good resale value make), and fly back to Chicago.

I can't describe how powerful the urge to get back on the road has been, and I'm jittery with excitement to get back to living on my own terms. This will be a short trip, only a month or so. I've got a new job starting on the other side of the world on December 16th, and I'm flying out from Chicago on the 14th, so I am a little bit constrained by time.

Alrighty, guys. I've gotta do some last minute bike adjustments, and then it's back on the road again (THANK GOD!).