Repaired the Donations Page Link! Continuing from Lexington, VA.

Hi! I'm back again :) Still trying to finish the online version of the 4500 Mile Ride for Charity story. I discovered while on this mission that keeping up with a full-fledged social media/online presence is a challenging task while you are riding across the continent on a motorcycle and living outdoors part-time. I will be including coverage of the social media experiment and the technology challenges in separate sections of the book I am writing on the ride.

When the story left off I had just departed Lexington, VA after a day of riding through the Shenandoah and Appalacian Mountains on my way to the NC/TN border area. Here are a couple shots from the riding to and from Lexington. Note another Winchester location on the sign above? Second one at least that I have seen on the trip... Had I taken the Route 11 instead of the interstate I might have driven through Winchester Virginia...pretty cool. I did check out part of route 11 at the advice of my good friend Terry Gagneux, but didn't have enough time or money to take the entire Route 11 through VA. I put that on my list for another time.



The riding through the Shenandoah, Appalacian and Great Smokey Mountains was all phenomenal! The weather was sunny and beautiful all three days that I rode along the western border of VA towards my destination of Deals Gap, near Tapoca, NC. There I would ride both The Dragon (US 129) and The Cherohala Skyway (US 143 and US165 through the Nantahala National Forest). There are so many scenic vistas riding through Virginia that I am going to have to return one day when I can take more time.

I rode late into the night to reach Knoxville and was sure I could make Deal's Gap Motorcycle Resort by a decent hour that evening. I shot out of Knoxville to complete the 50 or so miles Google Maps said I had remaining. After stopping to take the above shot outside Knoxville, TN, it began to get dark, and I continued clocking off the miles. Once at around 50 miles per my odometer, I stopped. It was now near 10pm, and I had overshot my destination by about 33 miles according to the locals, who then pointed me up US72 towards US 129. It was a pitch black night, and I rode throught the winding, twisting roads in the dark night, at ever slower speeds as I got up into the mountains. Talk about earie riding! I could tell there were ledges, but couldn't see what was beyond. No cars, no bikes, no light anywhere! Eventually I came to the intersection of 72 and 129 at another motorcycle resort called Punkin Center. The maps and newspaper articles told me was getting close to The Dragon.

I didn't want to ride The Dragon at night. I did not want to become one of the stories on the wall. I would have stayed at the Punkin Center, but no one was here at 11pm at night to check folks in to the rooms they advertised, so up 129 I went, unsure where I would stop for the night, hoping NOT to encounter The Dragon at night. My GPS wasn't working out there, so I just continued blindly.

Around midnight I encountered a National Forest sign for Abram's Creek. I was looking for just such a place, so I turned up that 2-lane road that turned into a one-lane, which turned into a thin, rocky, dirt road with pot-holes that led into the Abram's Creek National Forest. That last 15 miles or so up the mountain in the pitch black over dirt roads with invisible ledges was unnerving! I eventually made the park, figured out where to pitch my tent at midnight, and in the morning awoke by a serene creek...Abram's Creek in the Great Smokey Mountains.

The next morning I had a quick meditation down by the creek then headed to Deal's Gap. As fortune would have it, I ended up riding The Dragon early that morning, fully loaded, uphill, before the crotch rockets and people with something to prove got up on The Dragon. After I rode into Deal's Gap, I spen the rest of that day resting around my tent, which looked strangly like a Dragon. After a day's rest, I would wake up and ride the Cherohala Skyway and continue riding all the way until I reached a rest stop in Mississippi. I will pick up the story from the second rest stop in MS.