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There are two more pages of photos, the
mugshots and the bike shots.
Rode over from the Raleigh-Durham area on Friday on a pleasantly
cool though thoroughly overcast and occasionally drizzly day. At
least it made for interesting cloud collections in the hollows, like
the ones I tried to photograph at Lovers Leap. Police presence near
the Blue Ridge Parkway was very high all weekend, apparently related
to the nearby musical festival in Floyd.
Friday evening held a bit of a surprise as the pizza joint had live
bluegrass music. Saturday was quite low key and lazy; didn't even
warm up enough to follow through with the plan to find a swimming hole
and go for a swim, so instead just hung around the campground for the
bulk of the day, excepting a trip out to lunch and to visit the candy
factory.
Sunday's ride home started quite early for me; I'm normally still
asleep at 7:30am, not firing up my motorcycle. The intent had been to
ride the Blue Ridge Parkway all the way up to Waynesboro, jump on some
back roads through the Shenandoah Valley, then slab the rest of the
way through to Newburgh before picking up some other backroads into
Massachusetts.
Rain and thick fog on the Parkway was not entirely unpleasant but
killing my overall schedule for a return to Boston, so I bailed early
at Roanoke to start the tedious Interstate miles there. Coming off
the ridge I encountered a surprisingly long backup at a road crew guy
holding a stop sign. After 10 minutes or so of waiting I surmised it
was not a typical work zone so took a wild-assed guess about a way to
keep moving in the right direction on other roads. My directional
hunch turned out to be right and while on those other roads I
discovered quite a lot of flash flood damage, leading me to believe
that the problem back at the main road was related to it.
I stopped at Lynchburg for some fuel and a bite to eat. When I
went to return the book I was reading to my saddlebag after lunch, the
key broke off right in the lock, with no effort at all. Sonofabitch.
Met my mom and her husband at Matamoras, Pennsylvania, for dinner.
He's a mechanic and did what he could to try to get the broken key out
of the lock, but it just ended up wedged in farther. Oh well. I
eventually needed a locksmith, several days later back in Boston, to
fish the broken bit out with a specialized tool.
Got on to the Taconic Parkway up to Columbia County and Route 23 to
cross the Berkshires. Rain had been dogging me all day and it sure
didn't make the tar snakes all along 23 too much fun, but it still
beat I-84 across Connecticut. Managed to make it to the Mass Pike
right around dark for the final slab bit to Cambridge, some 850 miles
for the day.
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