Last Day

Eight days of riding in nine days, and 2,103 miles.  I can say I've had enough riding.......not too much, but enough.

This is my eight days bug collection:

Today I rode the "Devil's Triangle".  This is actually the fourth time on it for me, and Carolyn was on the back for one of those rides eight years ago.  It's not as spectacular as the Dragon, but it's really good and doesn't get as much crazy traffic.  Still, this being a weekend day, there were some bikes.....even a bunch of quads and side-by-sides.  It must be legal, somehow.  The ride is also close to where Carolyn's sisters live, so easy to get to.  I took one picture of a typical curve, and this is not the tightest by any means:

I didn't post any of the pictures from my visit to the AMA hall of fame museum, so I'll end this trip blog with some of those.

I got to the museum shortly after it opened and I was the only one who rode there.

There were bikes and riding gear from all the famous American road racers, motocrossers, flat track racers and off road racers.  Most of them were from my 55+ years of riding and were familiar to me.

This was the first modern 4-stroke motocross bike that started the revolution to modern 4-strokes.
It was an obvious one-off factory special.

This is one of Evel Knievel's bikes and shows some of the many body repairs he had.  I wonder who paid for all the surgery.

Bill Baird was the national champion enduro racer when I started riding enduros.  He was pretty much unbeatable, but only rode eastern enduros, not desert events like I rode.

The guy who rode this bike was incredible.  Read the story below.

I had one of these bikes, only it was black.  They are using it here to provide a simulation of riding.  Carolyn and I rode double on it from Fargo ND over to and around Lake Superior, camping out almost every night.  I crashed that bike on a ride down in Baja, and then later got sideswiped by a pickup truck and got a broken collar bone.  I figured it was an unlucky bike and gave it away.

Jeff Fredette rode this bike in several ISDE's and I had one like it......a Kawasaki KDX, my last real dirt bike.

That outfit that took the crash pictures that I had in my previous post took some photos of me (not crashing), and here are a couple:

Here is another photo taken by a different outfit where I have a little more lean going on:

I Do The Dragon Again!

Carolyn wanted to visit her sisters on this trip, and the benefit to me was that they live relatively close to the most famous motorcycle road in the country, the "Tail of the Dragon".  So while she was visiting, I went for a day ride and in addition to the Dragon, I rode the Cherohola Skyway, another destination motorcycle road.

This ride felt like an Orvie memorial ride.  I've done the ride three times now, and the last one was with Big Mike and Orv.  This was three years ago when Carolyn and I were on our "Grand Tour" of the US.  Mike and Orv flew in to local airports and we all rented motorcycles in Atlanta.  It's covered in this post http://thegoodroads.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2017-01-11T17:39:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false.  I think it was shortly after this ride that Orv got the diagnosis of lung cancer, so he was really glad that he got to go on this ride.  We each had a helmet intercom, and I remember lots of excited chatter about these two roads while we were riding.

I chose to do this ride on Friday because I thought there would be fewer motorcycles riding the Dragon, but there turned out to be a lot more than when we three last rode it.  The main motorcycle resort is at Deal's Gap.  Orv and Mike and I actually stayed at this resort.  They have some pretty basic accommodations:

 and this is what the parking lot looked like at 10 am on a weekday:

It really is a fantastic road....just the kind of second, third and fourth gear turns that I like and really smooth pavement (except for the gouges made my the cruiser bike footpegs).  However, my gps continues to bedevil me at times and once on the way back to the air b&b it ran me completely around in a circle, including this "road":

One of the features of the resort is the "tree of shame".....a tree decorated with parts from crashed motorcycles.  Last time Orv and I posed in front of it:

And this time I took pictures all around:

There is an outfit that takes photos at various spots on the ride, and you can buy a shot of yourself after they post them on their website in a day or two.  This also gives them the opportunity to catch people in the act of crashing, and they have posted some of these:

They have some cute Dragon-themed sculptures around too:

And I got me a souvenir:

For those of you reading this blog who don't give a twit about motorcycles, here are the scenery pics: