As promised, our two friends, Allen and Kieth from North Carolina, showed up Friday night with their KTM 990s. Kieth will continue up to New York on the 4th but Allen will ride south with us for a day.
During the day on Friday, I rode out to Baltimore to visit with my brother. On the way, I snapped some photos of some of the towns. This picture is pretty typical of the houses in the more populated areas. They all have front porches. Out west we have all gravitated to the back porch but out here, all the houses have front porches and people use them. We frequently pass through towns and people are waving to us from their porch. It's a really neat neighborhood feel.
This house won my unofficial "best 4th of July decoration" contest. There were many that were done up this well, but I chose this one because the color of the house and car contributed to the overall.
I'm going to interject a quick plug for our new friend Abhi at the Knight's Inn in Knoxville. We stayed there for two nights and the place was really well run, clean, and well priced. Thanks Abhi!
Allen did a great job getting that huge KTM down all the trails we had for the day. This river crossing presented a challenge but no mishaps:
Hank decided to put his rain gear to the test!
The countryside and forests were amazing.
You can see that Allen's bike dwarfs our bikes, but we have really grown to appreciate the lighter, smaller displacement bikes we have. They are very quiet, so we figure we see a lot more of the wildlife, they are lighter so they are easier to handle in the slippery mud and narrow trails. and they really halp us maintain the back roads attitude that we were after because they are not much fun at highway speeds!
We got a chance to visit with this turtle that was crossing the road.
We decided it was best to move him to the side. He looked a lot like a rock and there was the occasional car.
By the end of the day, we had covered 260 miles (our longest day yet). We rolled into Warm Springs Virginia around 7:30 so we unloaded, got cleaned up, and headed into neighbor Hot Springs for a bite to eat. After dinner we followed the locals to the golf course where we were treated to a live band and fireworks thanks to the Omni Hotel. The Omi looks amazing and the fireworks show was one of the best I've ever seen.
Sunday's ride will take us down to Marion, Virginia. Allen will be heading back to North Carolina. Thunderstorms are in the forecast for Sunday.... again!! It's also another long day with just over 250 miles to cover.
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