The long way home. Wednesday

Mileage: 405
States: MD, WV, VA, PA

Today we were wanting to go to the Gettysburg Battlefield and the HD assembly plant in York, PA.
Leaving MD, we finished out US50 and made it to Parkersburg, VA for breakfast (~10:30AM)
Continuing down the wrong road, we finally made it to Gettysburg around 12:30PM. Seeing as it was on the warm side and we were already hot from the ride up, we opted to wonder around the museum.

Leaving Gettysburg about 1PM we headed towards York, 30mi away, with the plan of arriving about 1:30PM to get a spot for the 2PM tour at HD. Well traffic conspired against us and we didn’t make it to York till 2:10PM. On top of that, I wasn’t sure where HD was.

Giving up on HD, we decided to grab a bite to eat and fill the tanks. This was a challenged because we were in York. York is annoying. There’s tons of streets and lots of buildings, but there’s nothing there! We drove around for ~20min before finally finding a Taco Bell. To that point we still hadn’t seen a fuel station! On top of the town being weird, the drivers are idiots, and I swear we caught every red light in town!

After pulling the map out in Taco Bell and plotting an escape route, we topped off the Camelbaks and proceeded down the road in search of a filling station.
Once out on the road we were making pretty good time. Traffic was moving, sun was shining, nobody’d tried to kill us in the last 15min, it was good.
Then it happened. Traffic came to a screeching halt and the sirens came wailing up behind us. Cresting the hill we discovered that three vehicles decided to get into a physical discussion and had shut down the highway.
While sitting there trying not to melt, a gentleman on a Triumph Thruxton rolled up and chatted with us. It was a beautiful yellow ’06 with a little black fairing around the headlight. Beautiful machine!

About the time all the traffic in front of us had been re-directed onto an alternate route, the cleared the road and we were able to continue down our originally planned route.

We made it to Front Royal, VA about 6:15PM, topped off the tanks and set off for Skyline Drive.
After a wrong turn down a wonderfully twisty road, we made it to the entrance about 7PM. Only to discover that its $10 per motorcycle, $15 for “normal” vehicles, to ride the road. We paid and began slowly working our way down the Drive. (Its 35mph the whole way) Fortunately the road is fairly twisty, but 35 is a bit too slow. Taking advantage of the error in the speedo, we increased speed a bit (45 ) and began enjoying the road more. The scenery is beautiful on the Skyline Drive!

About 2hrs later and 50mi in, we stopped for the night at a campground. Its $20/night to camp, there’s no power at the camp sites and they charge you $1/5min to take a shower. So much for camping being cheaper then a hotel!

Its really pretty here and the skunks are friendly so I think its worth it.