Deals Gap in Springtime, April 2-4 1999
Apr. 4th, 1999 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elizillaI wasn't going to go out on another long ride this weekend, but by Thursday my resolve was weakening. I fired off a note to Mike Stewart that I might take another shot at visiting his neighborhood. Later, I read messages that indicated Phil Ross was in that neck of the woods too, so I sent him a note to see if I could hook up with him. Saturday morning I was checking my email to see if either of them had responded, when my phone rang. It was Phil. He was at Jack Hunt's place in Tellico Plains, TN. Jack offered a private room and bath, and a waterbed to sleep in at his place. Can't beat that with a stick! I'm there. I got directions. They told me they'd still be out riding with Mike when I arrived, that they'd let him know, and Jack told me where to find the key and let myself in.
What can you say about 500 miles on the slab? Once again, I got gas in Milan, and hopped onto US23 south. I suppose I could have taken my bike up to the highest speed that I could, before the wind started to push me off the bike (I still haven't gotten a windshield) but I'd have had to go 120mph, which is faster than I would ever go, right? As usual, I moderated my speed at the Ohio border, and continued on down I-75.
Near Findlay I overtook another bike, a Harley touring bike with full hard luggage. It was interesting to see. I slowed and rode with the Harley for a little while. After twenty miles or so, the Harley rider waved goodbye and exited, leaving me alone with the cages again. North of Dayton I overtook three squids on 600cc sportbikes, one Honda, one Yamaha, and one Suzuki. The one on the Honda wasn't even wearing a helmet or leather, just jeans and flannel. I passed them, and they sped up to pass me. After all, what red-blooded squid can stand to be passed by a girl on a bike that hardly even has any plastic? I let them go ahead for a little while, then passed them again. We leapfrogged for ten or twenty miles, before I exited to get gas.
Just south of Dayton, it started to rain a little. I exited the freeway again and put on my rain coat. By the time I got back on the freeway, the rain had stopped. I kept the raincoat on anyways, and just north of Cincinnati it really started to come down. I don't have a full rainsuit, just the coat, so my lower body and hands got pretty wet. It wasn't cold, and I could live with the wet. But when it started raining so hard I couldn't see, and lightning started crashing all around, I decided it was time to stop and wait it out. I pulled off the freeway and under a gas station's overhang to wait. It rained and rained. I used the opportunity to fill up on snacks from the gas station; I needed to eat anyways. Eventually I decided it wasn't going to stop, but that the lightning had passed and the rain had slowed enough that I should at least be able to see. I put my stuff back on, added plastic grocery bags over my hands to keep my gloves from getting completely soaked, and went back out. By the time I got gas in Lexington the rain had stopped and the roads were dry except for the occasional puddle on the shoulder. I saw daffodils in bloom here and there along the highway, buds on the trees, and misty green hillsides.
In Knoxville I picked up 129 south. By this point I had maybe an hour of daylight left. I decided to be sensible and forego the Gap, at least for that night. I was tired, it would have been dark by the time I got through it, and I wasn't sure I could find Jack's house very easily in the dark. When 129 split away from 411, I followed 411 south, and took 360 to Tellico Plains. 360 is a lovely winding road; I liked it immensely. It was dusk when I arrived at Jack's house. Jack's driveway is gravel, steep and winding, kind of scary. I thought about going on into town and getting dinner before calling it quits for the day, but I decided I just didn't want to tackle that driveway in the dark. Besides, more than anything in the world I wanted to get my boots off, they had been soaked in Cincinnati and I'd had wet feet ever since, and the squishing around my toes was becoming increasingly unbearable. Jack had to have something in there I could eat for dinner.
The driveway went around behind the house, which was at the top of a hill. I spotted the infamous 3-car shed. I parked Cordelia on the concrete apron outside the shed, since it was level and I couldn't tell what kind of parking I might find near the house. I was still pretty gun-shy about slow speed maneuvering on gravel, and I didn't want to end up having to turn the bike around on a bad surface when I was so tired.
As I was unloading my stuff to walk up to the house, a dog came out of the shed and just stared at me. I thought, uh-oh! What's this dog going to do? Is it going to think I'm threatening its territory? I moved slowly and carefully away. The dog followed, and began wagging its tail. I was relieved, and slowly held out my hand for the dog to sniff. The dog stepped backwards while extending its neck, obviously shy but interested. I held my position until the dog's posture relaxed. Then I went back to unloading the bike, and the dog went back into the shed.
Up at the house, I saw that I could have parked there. But I decided to leave the bike where it was. I found the key just where Jack said he would leave it, and let myself into the house. No one was there. I sat at Jack's kitchen table and took my wet boots and wet socks off, it was heavenly!
OK, now what? I was becoming increasingly aware that all I'd eaten all day was two slices of cold pizza before leaving my house that morning, and some chips at that gas station in Cincinnati. I hated to start raiding the refrigerator when I hadn't even met the host yet, but I was not at all interested in putting my wet boots back on, or in tackling that driveway in the dark. There was a box of toaster pastries on the counter, and I decided to help myself. Sugar and fake cherry flavoring never tasted so good!
I finished my snack and went out onto the front porch. Jack's house is on the top of a small hill, and his porch has a good view of the road far below. I was brushing my hair on the porch when a car turned into the driveway. Who could this be? I thought Jack had gone off with Phil to ride bikes. The car roared around to the back of the house. I went inside to greet the new arrival, whoever it might be. It turned out to be Jack's daughter, Jessica.
"Hello!" I called as I heard her come in. I didn't want to startle her. She came into the kitchen and smiled at me. "Hi! Is my dad here?" "No." "Do you know when he's coming back?" "No." She went back outside and yelled to the person in the car "He's here... No, he can't come out, he's in the bathroom." The car roared away. She came back inside. "My mom would have made me go back with her if she knew he wasn't home, she won't let me stay here alone." So much for Jessica being startled to find a perfect stranger standing alone in her kitchen.
She bounded into the back of the house, and I heard an answering machine playing back there somewhere. Then she started returning phone calls. A few minutes later, she came back out and told me she was going over to Lisa's house, and she hoped the keys were in the four wheeler. She went outside and a few minutes later the four wheeler roared off into the evening.
I went into the living room and dozed off on the chair. As full darkness settled in, the frogs got really loud. Eventually, Jessica came back with Lisa. Lisa turned on the light so she could see me, and immediately came over to touch my hair. "It's so long! I wish my hair was like that!" She was just as friendly as Jessica. They were going to drive over to Maryville and take some clothes to Lisa's brother. Jessica asked if I could remember where she was going and when she'd be back and tell her dad if he came home. I said sure. Lisa worried that there would be a sobriety checkpoint between Tellico Plains and Maryville, and that she'd get caught driving without her glasses on and get a ticket for it this time. Apparently, she'd gone through a sobriety checkpoint without her glasses, and the LEO who checked her was someone she knew, who told her she shouldn't be driving without her glasses. I offered to drive Lisa's car for them, but I suspect they were not anxious to have some elderly person cramping their style on their trip; they declined.
An hour or so later, Lisa dropped Jessica off and went home. Jessica and I sat at the kitchen table and chatted of this and that. Jessica was pretty, open and friendly. She told me how she loves Tellico Plains and never wants to move away. I told her about coming from a town of similar size and remoteness, how the life I lived there seemed very ordinary at the time, and how when I got out into the larger world I discovered that having this kind of background is fairly unusual. Most of the kids she'll meet in college will be from places like Livonia, where the tract houses grow close together and the kids play at the mall instead of in the fields. She told me how her mother almost married a guy who lives in Marysville, how the guy had a really nice house but Jessica refused to move there. Now her mother laments that they could have had such a good life if she had married this guy. She told me about her boyfriends, about how she's having a hard time with algebra, and how she'd like to be a psychologist when she grows up. She was utterly charming, and I felt very protective of her. I hope she gets a chance to do exciting things in the world, that she doesn't end up thinking she has to marry some guy in Marysville so she can have a good life. We cooked a late dinner of macaroni and cheese from a box and frozen corn on the cob; the food was not that great but the company was marvelous.
[As I was working on this report, I saw a mention on the list of how Jack has put up a picture of Jessica on his web site. Certain 'maggots posted to make vaguely predatory remarks about her. If any 'maggot behaves inappropriately towards Jessica, and Jack leaves that 'maggot with any unbroken bones, I'll be happy to finish the job. Seriously, she's but a child, and it pains me to see this kind of predatory stuff.]
After dinner I sat on the floor in the computer room while she checked her email, and I looked at Jack's copy of Ron Ayres' book, Against the Wind. We played some CDs.
Then I heard the telltale sound of V4s outside. It was Jack and Phil, returning tired and happy after riding over 500 miles of twisties.
Jack is a burly man with curly red hair and a Tennessee accent. After having listened to Jessica speak for the last several hours, I had a lot less trouble understanding Jack than I might have had. Which is good, because it would be rough to be teased like that by someone if I was also having trouble understanding what they were saying. Jack told me he'd wanted to leave false teeth out for me to find when I got there, harking back to my tale of the hillbilly who tried to pick me up in the motel parking lot on my last trip to Deal's Gap. (I'm afraid that even if he had found some false teeth to leave out, that joke would have sailed right past me.)
Both Jack and Phil were suffering from travel-related ailments. One of Jack's eyes was so red that my own eyes teared involuntarily just looking at it. And Phil was suffering from some kind of muscle pain in one shoulder. I couldn't do anything about Jack's eye, but I rubbed Phil's shoulder for him. His response was catlike; he practically purred. Very gratifying.
During their riding, they had met another 'maggot, Beaver. Beaver had painted his bike to match a helmet; it was yellow, pink, and blue. Jack said he knew it sounded awful, but it was actually pretty good looking. He'd taken pictures with his digital camera, which he loaded onto his PC and showed me. We went outside to do some bike sniffing. The SlutSabre is very nice, it's in excellent condition. But the tires were shot. Phil was planning to get some new ones the following Monday, before he left the area.
The dog I had met earlier came up. I learned that the dog's name was Bullet. Jack told the tale of how the dog got its name. Bullet was owned by a guy who hunted with dogs. This dog was useless, he wouldn't join the other dogs. So the guy shot him in the head, and left him in the woods for dead. A month later he came back to the spot, and the dog came to him. The bullet had missed all vital areas and the dog had managed to survive. The guy didn't have the heart to shoot him again, so he gave him to Jack. Jack says the reason Bullet wouldn't join the other dogs is that he's stone deaf. He also has another unusual trait; he pees when someone pets him. Phil almost ended up with a wet shoe.
I would have been happy to sleep on the floor somewhere, but Jack insisted I take his bedroom while he slept on the floor in the computer room. I protested that I didn't want to take Jack's room from him, and Phil groused about not being offered a waterbed, but Jack was insistent. He says women have a lot to put up with and they have to do stuff in the morning that men don't need to do, so they need their privacy. This was news to me, but I could see that argument would get me nowhere. So I ended up with a waterbed and a private bathroom. Y'know, motorcyclists are not at all like science fiction fans.
The weather predictions for Sunday were not good. The weather channel showed a band of rainstorms stretching from Texas to Illinois, heading straight for us. But during the night, the clouds split. We awoke the next day to beautiful sunshine. During the night, the bank of rainstorms had split in two, some going by to the north and some to the south. Jack said I must be like Grethe and carry a blue spot above me.
Phil and I said our goodbyes to Jack and rode off to the skyway. I'm afraid I'm a bit timid about the curves; I don't encounter very many of them around home, so I haven't had a lot of practice. But Phil is an excellent coach. We stopped a few times, he gave me advice and everything just clicked. It was marvelous!
When I wrote of my last trip on the skyway, I said I had stopped at Hooper Cove. Jack sent me a message that there was no Hooper Cove. I would like to state for the record that I stopped there again, and there is a Hooper Cove. Phil was with me as a witness. In that report I also wrote that Tellico Plains was ugly, and I don't think Jack appreciated that. I hereby retract that statement. Maybe in February it's ugly, but in early April it was just beautiful, with green grass and flowers coming up everywhere. A veritable paradise.
All too soon, Phil and I reached Deal's Gap, where we were to part ways. I said something about lunch, and he said I should ride with him just a little farther, up to Fontana Dam, that there was food there. So I followed. At a gas station where the road forked, we stopped and he pointed me down a road and said there were places to eat down there, but he was going the other way to meet up with Mike Stewart. I rode down the road in search of the places to eat. I came to a gathering of buildings. There were no motorcycles anywhere; it appeared to be some kind of tourist area. I looked around at the choices, and the only place that appeared to be open had a sign advertising beanie babies, and three minivans in front.
It's against my religion to eat in a place that sells beanie babies, so I turned around and went back to the Crossroads of Time biker hangout. There, I purchased a bag of chips and a pop, and sat outside in the sun to eat them.
While I was there, I met a couple of interesting riders. The first was a fellow from Knoxville, Fred, who was riding a Moto Guzzi he had put together himself, starting with an old police bike and using parts from some other bikes as well. It was extremely cool. The next person I met was riding an Interceptor with some interesting mods. He had used old cans to replace the baffles in his exhaust, and he had an unusual arrangement of knobs and clamps attached to his throttle grip, not as a throttle lock, but to give himself more choices of how to twist the throttle. The bike had Native American symbols painted all over it, in red and yellow and black. But the most amazing thing about this bike was the front tire. It was worn down almost smooth on the sides, and still had lots of tread in the middle; it was practically vee-shaped. The rider was an older fellow named Pat Coffee; he had been riding for many years and many miles, and he had this mystical thing going. We traded tales of how to avoid close encounters of the cage kind, and talked of vee-four cams and rockers. He told of many miles of riding in the area, and of how he used to be a pilot. I told him about the sabmag list, and he has since joined.
By this point it was well past noon. I needed to get going if I was to make it back to Michigan that day. Fred gave me some advice about what roads to take once I made it past the Dragon. I had seen enough bike traffic that I thought I would certainly be passed as I rode the 318 curves in 11miles. But I wasn't. And the eleven miles went by much more quickly than it did last time. Phil's coaching had helped me a lot. The trip through the gap was without incident, except I almost got creamed by a bike coming the other way, flying around a curve halfway into my lane. Idiot.
After coming out of the gap, I turned right onto the Foothills Parkway. This was a beautiful road, and the few slow cages I overtook were easily dispatched. From there I picked my way north through Pigeon Forge and Sevierville. What awful towns these were; the roads were choked with traffic and both sides were lines with nasty tourist stuff like go-kart tracks, country music theaters, and souvenir shops. I'm not sure what the destination is that draws the tourist trade there, but whatever it is I want no part of it. Even so, I stopped at a Dairy Queen and bolted a hamburger, because I knew my blood sugar was crashing.
I should have gotten back on the freeway so as to get home at a reasonable hour, but I just didn't want to. I looked at my maps and decided to take 25E north to Kentucky. I could see a half dozen reasonable routes to get back to I-75 farther north, so I could reasonably put it off, right? I picked a route towards 25E, and after a half hour of battling traffic I finally got out of the tourist hell and onto some decent roads. What an incredible number of concrete and ceramic lawn ornaments people have in Tennessee!
25E had very little traffic, and it was four lanes wide. I made excellent time on it, even though it wasn't limited access. Until I came to the construction. But this too shall pass. I struggled through the construction zone, and I was thinking I should switch out of my sunglasses before I came to the tunnel, when suddenly the tunnel was upon me. There was no good place to pull off and change glasses, so I plunged into the tunnel with the sunglasses on. Fortunately the tunnel was well lit. Riding the bike through the tunnel reminded me of riding the subway through Toronto. Something about the subterranean feeling, the lights whizzing by on the wall, and the noise of the bike in the close confines, just made it feel very much like a subway.
Just after passing through the tunnel, I was going just slightly faster... well... significantly faster than I should have been, when a LEO passed me going the other way. I saw his brake lights in my mirror, before the road carried him out of sight around a curve, perhaps looking for a turnaround. I decided that now was a good time to stop for a break. There was a conveniently located gas station, and I pulled up just past the corner of the building, parked, and went in. They didn't have anything interesting, and I didn't see the friendly LEO come back, so after cleaning the bugs from my face shield I went on.
I should have followed 25E all the way back to I-75, but I didn't want to. Instead, I turned north on KY state route 11. This was an old road that paralleled a railroad track and a stream, the three crisscrossed almost like the three strands of a braid, back and forth. The railroad tracks were pretty rusty, like they seldom if ever saw trains anymore. The old towns I passed through looked like they had seen better days, perhaps when the railroad was running. I think it's really interesting to travel alongside railroad tracks, there are always old buildings to look at and I enjoy thinking about how the railroad was once so influential in the development of the towns along its path. I tried to imagine these towns in the heyday of the railroads.
When Route 11 ended, I got on US 421 north. This turned out to be another good choice; it was a small, relatively twisty federal highway very much in the mode of US 129, and there was very little traffic. I enjoyed the opportunity to make progress towards home and ride twisties at the same time.
Then I saw the signs. Construction ahead. Turn off two-way radios and cell phones. Blasting zone. Uh-oh. I came around a corner and there was a huge construction project going on! They had ripped right through the middle of a small mountain to make way for a road. It was an amazing sight, the sheer massiveness of it. The road I was on wound through the piles of rubble, and there was precious little pavement to be had, the surface was all rocks. I guess this federal highway isn't going to be a sleepy little rural road much longer, if they're working that hard to widen it.
The sun set as I was riding past a large military base. By the time I reached Richmond it was dark. Time to actually behave myself, to get back on the slab and make tracks for home. But first, I needed to eat. I found a gas station next to the freeway with a Wendy's attached to it, where I could combine food and refueling. What appeared to be a church youth group was at the next table; ten or eleven high school kids watched over by two nerdy looking adults in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. The girls were playing a game where they clapped, pounded the table, and passed paper cups back and forth in unison according to some predefined rhythm. It was an interesting game to see. I watched them, and watched two student athlete-looking boys watching them. They laughed and teased the girls but I could tell they were fascinated. A skinny boy with glasses joined the girls and the girls taught him the game, but the student athlete boys were too cool to play. Their loss.
Outside it had gotten significantly colder. I exchanged my summer glover for my ski mittens, and pushed along up I-75 as fast as I could. North of Cincinnati, I stopped at a rest area to hit the bathroom, and do something about my hair. Enough hairs had come out of my braids that they were tangling and making it hard for me to turn my head. I ended up rebraiding my hair there in the rest area, standing next to the bike. While I worked on this, an older guy stopped to chat. He was a character. He was from Rogers City Michigan and was currently on his way home from Florida. He was suffering from highway hypnosis and had been considering catching some zees in the rest area, but he was afraid someone would hit him on the head, after all you never know what kind of weirdoes you'll meet in a rest area. I laughed and said you're afraid of people in rest areas but you'll strike up a conversation with a scary, leather-clad motorcyclist? He said he could tell I was all right, and besides I had Michigan plates so I must be OK. Then he started telling me about picking up a stranded woman motorist in Memphis, her car was dead and he couldn't fix it, so he had given her a ride home to Cincinnati. He said he was glad she didn't hit him on the head. This guy had a real obsession about being hit on the head. He was also a bit deaf. It made him a strange conversationalist. I finished braiding my hair, wished him a safe trip home to Rogers City, and went on.
North of Dayton I ran into a terrible misting fog. For the next two hours I had to turn my head side to side, back and forth, so the wind would push the droplets off my face shield and let me see. Sort of like low tech windshield wipers. By the time I got to Lima I was so cold I could hardly bear it. I put on my ski bibs and turned my electric jacket up high, but it was still cold all the way home; the wet misting fog just seeped into everything and left me cold and damp. I got home around 3am, and it took me a good half hour to stop shivering.
Mileage for the weekend was 1327.4 miles. I got about 39 miles to the gallon.
What can you say about 500 miles on the slab? Once again, I got gas in Milan, and hopped onto US23 south. I suppose I could have taken my bike up to the highest speed that I could, before the wind started to push me off the bike (I still haven't gotten a windshield) but I'd have had to go 120mph, which is faster than I would ever go, right? As usual, I moderated my speed at the Ohio border, and continued on down I-75.
Near Findlay I overtook another bike, a Harley touring bike with full hard luggage. It was interesting to see. I slowed and rode with the Harley for a little while. After twenty miles or so, the Harley rider waved goodbye and exited, leaving me alone with the cages again. North of Dayton I overtook three squids on 600cc sportbikes, one Honda, one Yamaha, and one Suzuki. The one on the Honda wasn't even wearing a helmet or leather, just jeans and flannel. I passed them, and they sped up to pass me. After all, what red-blooded squid can stand to be passed by a girl on a bike that hardly even has any plastic? I let them go ahead for a little while, then passed them again. We leapfrogged for ten or twenty miles, before I exited to get gas.
Just south of Dayton, it started to rain a little. I exited the freeway again and put on my rain coat. By the time I got back on the freeway, the rain had stopped. I kept the raincoat on anyways, and just north of Cincinnati it really started to come down. I don't have a full rainsuit, just the coat, so my lower body and hands got pretty wet. It wasn't cold, and I could live with the wet. But when it started raining so hard I couldn't see, and lightning started crashing all around, I decided it was time to stop and wait it out. I pulled off the freeway and under a gas station's overhang to wait. It rained and rained. I used the opportunity to fill up on snacks from the gas station; I needed to eat anyways. Eventually I decided it wasn't going to stop, but that the lightning had passed and the rain had slowed enough that I should at least be able to see. I put my stuff back on, added plastic grocery bags over my hands to keep my gloves from getting completely soaked, and went back out. By the time I got gas in Lexington the rain had stopped and the roads were dry except for the occasional puddle on the shoulder. I saw daffodils in bloom here and there along the highway, buds on the trees, and misty green hillsides.
In Knoxville I picked up 129 south. By this point I had maybe an hour of daylight left. I decided to be sensible and forego the Gap, at least for that night. I was tired, it would have been dark by the time I got through it, and I wasn't sure I could find Jack's house very easily in the dark. When 129 split away from 411, I followed 411 south, and took 360 to Tellico Plains. 360 is a lovely winding road; I liked it immensely. It was dusk when I arrived at Jack's house. Jack's driveway is gravel, steep and winding, kind of scary. I thought about going on into town and getting dinner before calling it quits for the day, but I decided I just didn't want to tackle that driveway in the dark. Besides, more than anything in the world I wanted to get my boots off, they had been soaked in Cincinnati and I'd had wet feet ever since, and the squishing around my toes was becoming increasingly unbearable. Jack had to have something in there I could eat for dinner.
The driveway went around behind the house, which was at the top of a hill. I spotted the infamous 3-car shed. I parked Cordelia on the concrete apron outside the shed, since it was level and I couldn't tell what kind of parking I might find near the house. I was still pretty gun-shy about slow speed maneuvering on gravel, and I didn't want to end up having to turn the bike around on a bad surface when I was so tired.
As I was unloading my stuff to walk up to the house, a dog came out of the shed and just stared at me. I thought, uh-oh! What's this dog going to do? Is it going to think I'm threatening its territory? I moved slowly and carefully away. The dog followed, and began wagging its tail. I was relieved, and slowly held out my hand for the dog to sniff. The dog stepped backwards while extending its neck, obviously shy but interested. I held my position until the dog's posture relaxed. Then I went back to unloading the bike, and the dog went back into the shed.
Up at the house, I saw that I could have parked there. But I decided to leave the bike where it was. I found the key just where Jack said he would leave it, and let myself into the house. No one was there. I sat at Jack's kitchen table and took my wet boots and wet socks off, it was heavenly!
OK, now what? I was becoming increasingly aware that all I'd eaten all day was two slices of cold pizza before leaving my house that morning, and some chips at that gas station in Cincinnati. I hated to start raiding the refrigerator when I hadn't even met the host yet, but I was not at all interested in putting my wet boots back on, or in tackling that driveway in the dark. There was a box of toaster pastries on the counter, and I decided to help myself. Sugar and fake cherry flavoring never tasted so good!
I finished my snack and went out onto the front porch. Jack's house is on the top of a small hill, and his porch has a good view of the road far below. I was brushing my hair on the porch when a car turned into the driveway. Who could this be? I thought Jack had gone off with Phil to ride bikes. The car roared around to the back of the house. I went inside to greet the new arrival, whoever it might be. It turned out to be Jack's daughter, Jessica.
"Hello!" I called as I heard her come in. I didn't want to startle her. She came into the kitchen and smiled at me. "Hi! Is my dad here?" "No." "Do you know when he's coming back?" "No." She went back outside and yelled to the person in the car "He's here... No, he can't come out, he's in the bathroom." The car roared away. She came back inside. "My mom would have made me go back with her if she knew he wasn't home, she won't let me stay here alone." So much for Jessica being startled to find a perfect stranger standing alone in her kitchen.
She bounded into the back of the house, and I heard an answering machine playing back there somewhere. Then she started returning phone calls. A few minutes later, she came back out and told me she was going over to Lisa's house, and she hoped the keys were in the four wheeler. She went outside and a few minutes later the four wheeler roared off into the evening.
I went into the living room and dozed off on the chair. As full darkness settled in, the frogs got really loud. Eventually, Jessica came back with Lisa. Lisa turned on the light so she could see me, and immediately came over to touch my hair. "It's so long! I wish my hair was like that!" She was just as friendly as Jessica. They were going to drive over to Maryville and take some clothes to Lisa's brother. Jessica asked if I could remember where she was going and when she'd be back and tell her dad if he came home. I said sure. Lisa worried that there would be a sobriety checkpoint between Tellico Plains and Maryville, and that she'd get caught driving without her glasses on and get a ticket for it this time. Apparently, she'd gone through a sobriety checkpoint without her glasses, and the LEO who checked her was someone she knew, who told her she shouldn't be driving without her glasses. I offered to drive Lisa's car for them, but I suspect they were not anxious to have some elderly person cramping their style on their trip; they declined.
An hour or so later, Lisa dropped Jessica off and went home. Jessica and I sat at the kitchen table and chatted of this and that. Jessica was pretty, open and friendly. She told me how she loves Tellico Plains and never wants to move away. I told her about coming from a town of similar size and remoteness, how the life I lived there seemed very ordinary at the time, and how when I got out into the larger world I discovered that having this kind of background is fairly unusual. Most of the kids she'll meet in college will be from places like Livonia, where the tract houses grow close together and the kids play at the mall instead of in the fields. She told me how her mother almost married a guy who lives in Marysville, how the guy had a really nice house but Jessica refused to move there. Now her mother laments that they could have had such a good life if she had married this guy. She told me about her boyfriends, about how she's having a hard time with algebra, and how she'd like to be a psychologist when she grows up. She was utterly charming, and I felt very protective of her. I hope she gets a chance to do exciting things in the world, that she doesn't end up thinking she has to marry some guy in Marysville so she can have a good life. We cooked a late dinner of macaroni and cheese from a box and frozen corn on the cob; the food was not that great but the company was marvelous.
[As I was working on this report, I saw a mention on the list of how Jack has put up a picture of Jessica on his web site. Certain 'maggots posted to make vaguely predatory remarks about her. If any 'maggot behaves inappropriately towards Jessica, and Jack leaves that 'maggot with any unbroken bones, I'll be happy to finish the job. Seriously, she's but a child, and it pains me to see this kind of predatory stuff.]
After dinner I sat on the floor in the computer room while she checked her email, and I looked at Jack's copy of Ron Ayres' book, Against the Wind. We played some CDs.
Then I heard the telltale sound of V4s outside. It was Jack and Phil, returning tired and happy after riding over 500 miles of twisties.
Jack is a burly man with curly red hair and a Tennessee accent. After having listened to Jessica speak for the last several hours, I had a lot less trouble understanding Jack than I might have had. Which is good, because it would be rough to be teased like that by someone if I was also having trouble understanding what they were saying. Jack told me he'd wanted to leave false teeth out for me to find when I got there, harking back to my tale of the hillbilly who tried to pick me up in the motel parking lot on my last trip to Deal's Gap. (I'm afraid that even if he had found some false teeth to leave out, that joke would have sailed right past me.)
Both Jack and Phil were suffering from travel-related ailments. One of Jack's eyes was so red that my own eyes teared involuntarily just looking at it. And Phil was suffering from some kind of muscle pain in one shoulder. I couldn't do anything about Jack's eye, but I rubbed Phil's shoulder for him. His response was catlike; he practically purred. Very gratifying.
During their riding, they had met another 'maggot, Beaver. Beaver had painted his bike to match a helmet; it was yellow, pink, and blue. Jack said he knew it sounded awful, but it was actually pretty good looking. He'd taken pictures with his digital camera, which he loaded onto his PC and showed me. We went outside to do some bike sniffing. The SlutSabre is very nice, it's in excellent condition. But the tires were shot. Phil was planning to get some new ones the following Monday, before he left the area.
The dog I had met earlier came up. I learned that the dog's name was Bullet. Jack told the tale of how the dog got its name. Bullet was owned by a guy who hunted with dogs. This dog was useless, he wouldn't join the other dogs. So the guy shot him in the head, and left him in the woods for dead. A month later he came back to the spot, and the dog came to him. The bullet had missed all vital areas and the dog had managed to survive. The guy didn't have the heart to shoot him again, so he gave him to Jack. Jack says the reason Bullet wouldn't join the other dogs is that he's stone deaf. He also has another unusual trait; he pees when someone pets him. Phil almost ended up with a wet shoe.
I would have been happy to sleep on the floor somewhere, but Jack insisted I take his bedroom while he slept on the floor in the computer room. I protested that I didn't want to take Jack's room from him, and Phil groused about not being offered a waterbed, but Jack was insistent. He says women have a lot to put up with and they have to do stuff in the morning that men don't need to do, so they need their privacy. This was news to me, but I could see that argument would get me nowhere. So I ended up with a waterbed and a private bathroom. Y'know, motorcyclists are not at all like science fiction fans.
The weather predictions for Sunday were not good. The weather channel showed a band of rainstorms stretching from Texas to Illinois, heading straight for us. But during the night, the clouds split. We awoke the next day to beautiful sunshine. During the night, the bank of rainstorms had split in two, some going by to the north and some to the south. Jack said I must be like Grethe and carry a blue spot above me.
Phil and I said our goodbyes to Jack and rode off to the skyway. I'm afraid I'm a bit timid about the curves; I don't encounter very many of them around home, so I haven't had a lot of practice. But Phil is an excellent coach. We stopped a few times, he gave me advice and everything just clicked. It was marvelous!
When I wrote of my last trip on the skyway, I said I had stopped at Hooper Cove. Jack sent me a message that there was no Hooper Cove. I would like to state for the record that I stopped there again, and there is a Hooper Cove. Phil was with me as a witness. In that report I also wrote that Tellico Plains was ugly, and I don't think Jack appreciated that. I hereby retract that statement. Maybe in February it's ugly, but in early April it was just beautiful, with green grass and flowers coming up everywhere. A veritable paradise.
All too soon, Phil and I reached Deal's Gap, where we were to part ways. I said something about lunch, and he said I should ride with him just a little farther, up to Fontana Dam, that there was food there. So I followed. At a gas station where the road forked, we stopped and he pointed me down a road and said there were places to eat down there, but he was going the other way to meet up with Mike Stewart. I rode down the road in search of the places to eat. I came to a gathering of buildings. There were no motorcycles anywhere; it appeared to be some kind of tourist area. I looked around at the choices, and the only place that appeared to be open had a sign advertising beanie babies, and three minivans in front.
It's against my religion to eat in a place that sells beanie babies, so I turned around and went back to the Crossroads of Time biker hangout. There, I purchased a bag of chips and a pop, and sat outside in the sun to eat them.
While I was there, I met a couple of interesting riders. The first was a fellow from Knoxville, Fred, who was riding a Moto Guzzi he had put together himself, starting with an old police bike and using parts from some other bikes as well. It was extremely cool. The next person I met was riding an Interceptor with some interesting mods. He had used old cans to replace the baffles in his exhaust, and he had an unusual arrangement of knobs and clamps attached to his throttle grip, not as a throttle lock, but to give himself more choices of how to twist the throttle. The bike had Native American symbols painted all over it, in red and yellow and black. But the most amazing thing about this bike was the front tire. It was worn down almost smooth on the sides, and still had lots of tread in the middle; it was practically vee-shaped. The rider was an older fellow named Pat Coffee; he had been riding for many years and many miles, and he had this mystical thing going. We traded tales of how to avoid close encounters of the cage kind, and talked of vee-four cams and rockers. He told of many miles of riding in the area, and of how he used to be a pilot. I told him about the sabmag list, and he has since joined.
By this point it was well past noon. I needed to get going if I was to make it back to Michigan that day. Fred gave me some advice about what roads to take once I made it past the Dragon. I had seen enough bike traffic that I thought I would certainly be passed as I rode the 318 curves in 11miles. But I wasn't. And the eleven miles went by much more quickly than it did last time. Phil's coaching had helped me a lot. The trip through the gap was without incident, except I almost got creamed by a bike coming the other way, flying around a curve halfway into my lane. Idiot.
After coming out of the gap, I turned right onto the Foothills Parkway. This was a beautiful road, and the few slow cages I overtook were easily dispatched. From there I picked my way north through Pigeon Forge and Sevierville. What awful towns these were; the roads were choked with traffic and both sides were lines with nasty tourist stuff like go-kart tracks, country music theaters, and souvenir shops. I'm not sure what the destination is that draws the tourist trade there, but whatever it is I want no part of it. Even so, I stopped at a Dairy Queen and bolted a hamburger, because I knew my blood sugar was crashing.
I should have gotten back on the freeway so as to get home at a reasonable hour, but I just didn't want to. I looked at my maps and decided to take 25E north to Kentucky. I could see a half dozen reasonable routes to get back to I-75 farther north, so I could reasonably put it off, right? I picked a route towards 25E, and after a half hour of battling traffic I finally got out of the tourist hell and onto some decent roads. What an incredible number of concrete and ceramic lawn ornaments people have in Tennessee!
25E had very little traffic, and it was four lanes wide. I made excellent time on it, even though it wasn't limited access. Until I came to the construction. But this too shall pass. I struggled through the construction zone, and I was thinking I should switch out of my sunglasses before I came to the tunnel, when suddenly the tunnel was upon me. There was no good place to pull off and change glasses, so I plunged into the tunnel with the sunglasses on. Fortunately the tunnel was well lit. Riding the bike through the tunnel reminded me of riding the subway through Toronto. Something about the subterranean feeling, the lights whizzing by on the wall, and the noise of the bike in the close confines, just made it feel very much like a subway.
Just after passing through the tunnel, I was going just slightly faster... well... significantly faster than I should have been, when a LEO passed me going the other way. I saw his brake lights in my mirror, before the road carried him out of sight around a curve, perhaps looking for a turnaround. I decided that now was a good time to stop for a break. There was a conveniently located gas station, and I pulled up just past the corner of the building, parked, and went in. They didn't have anything interesting, and I didn't see the friendly LEO come back, so after cleaning the bugs from my face shield I went on.
I should have followed 25E all the way back to I-75, but I didn't want to. Instead, I turned north on KY state route 11. This was an old road that paralleled a railroad track and a stream, the three crisscrossed almost like the three strands of a braid, back and forth. The railroad tracks were pretty rusty, like they seldom if ever saw trains anymore. The old towns I passed through looked like they had seen better days, perhaps when the railroad was running. I think it's really interesting to travel alongside railroad tracks, there are always old buildings to look at and I enjoy thinking about how the railroad was once so influential in the development of the towns along its path. I tried to imagine these towns in the heyday of the railroads.
When Route 11 ended, I got on US 421 north. This turned out to be another good choice; it was a small, relatively twisty federal highway very much in the mode of US 129, and there was very little traffic. I enjoyed the opportunity to make progress towards home and ride twisties at the same time.
Then I saw the signs. Construction ahead. Turn off two-way radios and cell phones. Blasting zone. Uh-oh. I came around a corner and there was a huge construction project going on! They had ripped right through the middle of a small mountain to make way for a road. It was an amazing sight, the sheer massiveness of it. The road I was on wound through the piles of rubble, and there was precious little pavement to be had, the surface was all rocks. I guess this federal highway isn't going to be a sleepy little rural road much longer, if they're working that hard to widen it.
The sun set as I was riding past a large military base. By the time I reached Richmond it was dark. Time to actually behave myself, to get back on the slab and make tracks for home. But first, I needed to eat. I found a gas station next to the freeway with a Wendy's attached to it, where I could combine food and refueling. What appeared to be a church youth group was at the next table; ten or eleven high school kids watched over by two nerdy looking adults in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. The girls were playing a game where they clapped, pounded the table, and passed paper cups back and forth in unison according to some predefined rhythm. It was an interesting game to see. I watched them, and watched two student athlete-looking boys watching them. They laughed and teased the girls but I could tell they were fascinated. A skinny boy with glasses joined the girls and the girls taught him the game, but the student athlete boys were too cool to play. Their loss.
Outside it had gotten significantly colder. I exchanged my summer glover for my ski mittens, and pushed along up I-75 as fast as I could. North of Cincinnati, I stopped at a rest area to hit the bathroom, and do something about my hair. Enough hairs had come out of my braids that they were tangling and making it hard for me to turn my head. I ended up rebraiding my hair there in the rest area, standing next to the bike. While I worked on this, an older guy stopped to chat. He was a character. He was from Rogers City Michigan and was currently on his way home from Florida. He was suffering from highway hypnosis and had been considering catching some zees in the rest area, but he was afraid someone would hit him on the head, after all you never know what kind of weirdoes you'll meet in a rest area. I laughed and said you're afraid of people in rest areas but you'll strike up a conversation with a scary, leather-clad motorcyclist? He said he could tell I was all right, and besides I had Michigan plates so I must be OK. Then he started telling me about picking up a stranded woman motorist in Memphis, her car was dead and he couldn't fix it, so he had given her a ride home to Cincinnati. He said he was glad she didn't hit him on the head. This guy had a real obsession about being hit on the head. He was also a bit deaf. It made him a strange conversationalist. I finished braiding my hair, wished him a safe trip home to Rogers City, and went on.
North of Dayton I ran into a terrible misting fog. For the next two hours I had to turn my head side to side, back and forth, so the wind would push the droplets off my face shield and let me see. Sort of like low tech windshield wipers. By the time I got to Lima I was so cold I could hardly bear it. I put on my ski bibs and turned my electric jacket up high, but it was still cold all the way home; the wet misting fog just seeped into everything and left me cold and damp. I got home around 3am, and it took me a good half hour to stop shivering.
Mileage for the weekend was 1327.4 miles. I got about 39 miles to the gallon.
