Day 7, Thursday August 22nd
Bakersville, North Carolina to Pineville, West Virginia
277 Miles, 43mph average
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Day 7, Thursday August 22nd |
Day 7 started out well. Typically I hadn't planned anything for breakfast, but today Michael had my back. The dinning room of the Bicycle Inn was set up to feed large groups of bicyclists heading off for a hard day in the North Carolina Mountains. This meant he had on store plenty of healthy cereals, fresh fruits, and bagels as well as coffee, tea and juice. He put out a splendid buffet for just the four of us. Not a microwavable breakfast sandwich in site.
I think we must have grown a little on Michael the same way he had grown on us during our brief stay because he followed us down to the parking lot to say goodbye. The Bicycle Inn was definitely a top notch experience. I hope to return when I can spend more time. With the past five days in the mountains now under our belt, we were well into the trip, and everybody was in synch and feeling good. We started out heading North towards Roan Mountain, Tennessee and were across the border in record time. We had been gleefully free of mechanical failures the entire trip but fate caught up with us in Roan Mountain when I got a flat. This was actually the first flat I have ever had in all my years of motorcycling. I've always feared a dramatic high speed blow out, but I didn't even notice something was amiss until we started back up after a fifteen minute rest stop. I'm not sure when I picked it up, but a small piece of glass had pierced my rear tire, and I was out of air. Matt had headed off in one direction following the route he had designed, and Adam and Zac were well gone before I was capable of verbalizing that something was wrong. This left me all alone push my motorcycle.
Luckily there was a gas station about 150 yards away, unluckily the heavily laden ZX6R was a bitch and a half to push with the flat. It was hot too! My perforated jacket didn't do me a whole lot of good huffing and puffing along at 2mph. I finally got it over to the air station, attached the hose, and using my exceptional analytical skills, observed that air was flowing out of the tire at pretty much exactly the same rate I was pumping it in. Luckily Adam and Zac returned at this point, keeping me from reflecting too heavily on the metaphysical implications of my discovery.
As the three of us stood around contemplating contemplating the flat, a local fellow filling up his pickup truck offered us the use of his flat repair kit. I was 100% totally unaware of the existence of such a thing. The kit basically consists of a bunch of pipe cleaners covered in rubber glue, an applicator stick to push them in to the hole, and a scissors to trim the excess. In NYC, we simply take our flats to the Flat-Fix guys on 4th Avenue, so this technology seemed highly suspect to me. On other hand I have had good results with cans of flat fix, so I politely refused his offer and headed off to the adjacent convenient store to buy a can. What I was too dense to realize, and what he obviously knew, was that the hole was way too big to close with a can of Flat-Fix. The thing that continues to amaze me is that rather than giving up with a shrug or trying to convince me of the obvious, he simply took time out of his day to wait around until I figured it out for myself. What a exceptional example of politeness. Not only did he wait until I came around, he gave us his flat repair kit in case we ran in to the same problem in the future. I wonder if I will ever grow up to be as nice and thoughtful as that guy was. It ended up being a three step fix: first the pipe cleaner patch, then the flat fix, and then finally real air. Needless to say this didn't inspire a ton of confidence in me, and I took it easy until we were able to have the patch professionally repaired at Boone Action Cycle in N. Vilas, North Carolina.
We tagged quite a few states over the course of Day 7. We started in North Carolina, jumped up to Tennessee, jogged right back into North Carolina, then traversed the South West corner of Virginia before finally ending up back in West Virginia where the trip had begun in earnest. We would head pretty much straight North for the remainder of the trip until we bumped into Ohio. The trip wasn't over, but we were definitely beginning to glimpse the end. As the afternoon wore on, and we ticked off the states, Adam and I were beginning to slide our rear (and even occasionally our front) tires in turns. Our tires had made a valiant effort, but after about 1500 miles of extremely aggressive riding they were not surprisingly starting to complain a little. Luckily they stayed with us through the tight twists and turns of the afternoon, never going off completely. Now all this talk of sliding and tires going off is fine on a racetrack, but frankly it's something we could have done without on the street. As the day wore on and we made our way to West Virginia, the roads became faster and more open with less tight stuff. These conditions seemed to bother the tires less, and we soon stopped noticing any slippage. The section of West Virginia we were flying up through was quite a bit less developed then the area surrounding the Monongahela in which we started. It was definitely beautiful in it's own way, but the towns were much more down trodden and depressing. It reminded me of some of the mill towns of New York State that haven't really been thriving since the 19th century. Our stopping point for the evening, Pineville, was one such down trodden town.
Our motel, on the other hand, was well beyond depressing. It was an out and out pit. It least it was appropriately monikered, the Cow Shed. The rooms had cracked windows and reeked of smoke, mold, and other things best left uncontemplated. There wasn't a lot of lodging in the area, and I had chosen the Cow Shed because it claimed to have a restaurant. To be precise it had a pizza place, or maybe pizza pit would be more accurate. I asked about alternate restaurants, and when met with a quizzical stare, I explained that we had just had pizza last night. Well we weren't gonna do much better. Apparently the town only had three restaurants. Dairy Queen, Subway and the aforementioned Pizza pit. It was off to the Dairy Queen for us. A far cry from the morning's breakfast, but food never the less. We sat outside and watched the locals cruise the drag, limited as it was. Then it was back to the Shed where we felt it prudent to lock all our motorcycles together in a big circle in front of our rooms. This was definitely the low point of the trip in lodging. |
