Day 9

Day 9
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

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Walmart Supercenter Alert
The count is now 15….

Today we are getting ready to leave Sevierville and head back across the Smokey’s via the Foothill Parkway and back through Deals Gap again. We will then connect to the Blue Ridge Parkway at the Cherokee Indian Reservation. We are not sure were we are stopping today. We will just ride until it is time to call it a day. I will update again on Thursday when we get to Myrtle Beach.

You can see from this picture how much we have packed on two motorcycles.

Wow what a day… Today’s ride was one of the most beautiful rides that I have done, including all of my rides in California. We went over the Smokey Mountains via the Foothill Parkway.

This is a beautiful easy going road with minimal traffic and fantastic views of the Smokies.

The Foothill Parkway connects up with 129 that leads you down to Deals Gap. We rode the Dragon one more time and I have to say this road is crazy, switchback after switchback. It was a lot different riding this road with all of the gear on our bikes. We ended up watching a piece of history while we were there. There is this little thing in the motorcycle community called “Iron Butt”. To receive this honor you have to log 1,000 miles in the saddle in a 24 hour period. Well there is this guy that rides Deals Gap on a yellow Honda Gold Wing, a.k.a the Yellow Wolf . He was in the middle of his 24 hour ride on the Dragon. He started Tuesday night at 6 PM and logged 1,000 miles on this 11 mile twisty road in just under 24 hours. He only had 20 minutes of total break time spread over 3 stops. Let me tell you this guy was flying on this Gold Wing. We were coming down the road when he came on us and we let him pass. I then realized after he passed that it was a Honda Gold Wing, so I had to take off and try to catch him. He obviously knew the road as there are a lot of blind corners that decrease in radius. It took me a while to catch up to him but I did. I was scraping my center stand on some of the corners. He was moving… It was amazing to see someone make such a huge bike carve the corners.

We then continued down 129 and connected with 28. This is also another amazing road. It winds along between the mountains next to a lake. The scenery was stunning. We later jumped on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is an amazing road… It is a two lane road with no commercial traffic allowed. The max speed limit is 45 mph and it just winds along in the mountains through the Carolinas and into Virginia. This is the best road in America hands down. If you have never been on this road you need to. It was very cold at the higher elevations on the parkway as you can see from this picture.

We ended up finding a nice camp site along a river outside of Asheville. So we hung out here for the night and slept in our tent. We figured that we were carrying all of this gear and we were going to make sure we camped one night.