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: