October 4 and beyond

Well, yesterday is a day we don’t really want to remember. We did a lot of traveling down the Interstate through Virginia in the fog, then we went through a small section of Tennessee and then into Asheville, NC to see the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. However, when we got there after driving through downtown Asheville about 3 p.m., (closes at 5 p.m.) we discovered that it was $47/person to do the whole estate tour, including the mansion and the wineries. We debated about this for a while, and then decided to skip it and head back up to the campground we had planned on staying at.

We found it, but unfortunately it was a very long, very uphill, very curvy gravel road, and about halfway up the drive, Steve was turning the bike with the trailer into the sun on gravel in a sharp right turn and started to slide. I, of course, screamed!!!! The whole rig was sliding backwards, and Steve was trying to stop it. He finally succeeded, I got off the bike, put a rock behind the trailer to stop any further sliding, and we both took one short deep breath. Obviously the next thing to do was to detach the trailer which by now was jackknifed. As I was gathering strength to do that, a couple came along behind us and saw our predicament. He helped me detach the trailer and was going to tow it up to the campground for us, but in the meantime, Steve had ridden the Wing up the hill (after we rescued him once from again sliding down the curve into the “low shoulder”*). He decided that we were having nothing to do with this campground and we would just turn the trailer around and tow it down. Then it wouldn’t start. So we had to get out the book and tools and check all the fuses to see why it wouldn’t go into neutral so it would start. After Steve finally got it started, he towed the trailer back down the gravel road, and I walked to the bottom. We headed out of Asheville as quickly as we could, and found a nice KOA out of town to the west to stay at.

So Asheville wasn’t a great experience for us, but Paul at the KOA was! He was a lovely fellow and worked as the maintenance man. He was from Rhode Island, but left about 2 years ago after a long life as a maintenance worker. Since he left, he has worked around at KOA’s until he found the one where we met him. He just LOVES his job and his life now. I called him Happy Paul, because he was just so “darn” (borrowed from Sarah Palin) happy!

This morning we got up and had coffee and beignets at the KOA office, Ummm, yummy. Then we headed out to Deals Gap, the motorcyclists’ mecca. 318 curves in 11 miles.

On our way to Deals Gap, and the beginning of the 318 curves, we probably took 320 curves, some marked ‘caution: 10 MPH”! What a beautiful ride! I snapped pics along the way, and we went through the 11 miles with no problems and with only 4 bikers passing us! Highly technical riding but not at fast speeds! Steve, Kevin, Norm and Phyllis and I once did a section of Hwy 1A in northern California that had a sign as you are going into it, “curves, next 21 miles”. It certainly was many, many more curves than Deals Gap was! But now Steve can say he rode “the Tail of the Dragon”! And it was beautiful, too.

After that, we stopped to buy souvenir T-shirts and stuff, have lunch and figure out the best way to get to Houston to see Norm. We reprogrammed the GPS for fastest way to Houston, and started out. Tonight we are camped at a campground just inside Alabama and tomorrow we are headed for Birmingham. We will spend the night in Birmingham, and see the Barber Motorsports Museum and the Birmingham Museum of Art (supposedly the finest regional museum in the Southeast) to see the Da Vinci exhibit! Then onto Louisiana the next day and to Norm’s on Tuesday.