The long way home. Thursday

Miles: 320
States: VA, NC

Getting up about 7AM we started loading the bikes. And watching the clouds roll in.
Broke out the VX-7R and listened to the NWS forcast to see what was happening. They said it would be afternoon before anything fell out of the sky. Well, they were wrong. Just after getting the tent broke down, it started raining. Not hard, just enough to get everything wet.
Waiting a bit for it to wash off the roads, it stopped raining. So we loaded up and headed down the last half of Skyline Drive.

Arriving at the bottom, we looked at how far we had to go and how much time we had and decided we needed to make up some time. So we jumped on the interstate and headed south at a brisk pace. But only after getting some food at Shoney’s.
I was pleased to see that they had sweet tea on the menu. Nice to be heading back towards the south again!

After about 3hrs on the Intersate, we were sick of it. And our iPods had died. So we jumped off onto US221. Once into NC, the road got wonderfully twisty. The 2nd county in NC, Ashe, was horrible! The road was still twisty, but the pavement was like a roller coaster! Up and down, left and right, all for no apparent reason, just terrible paving work.

Once through that we found a CiCi’s pizza and had some food.

Deciding we’d had enough for the day, we looked up the local KOA and rented a couple movies.
Unknown to us, there was a BMW motorcycle gathering at the same KOA, so the place is full of Bavarian hardware.

I’d been watching the rear tire on the ST1300 and was hoping it would survive till Atlanta where I had a tire waiting at Cyclegear. Sadly its not going to make it, so we are going to hit the local tire shops in the morning and get a replacement. Hopefully