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Deals Gap and Shady Valley, 09/01/07 – 09/07/07

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Well, another great trip south is over.  I stayed at Deals Gap from 09/01 and left on 09/07.  I took three days going home and got to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway and visited Shady Valley. 

What a great trip it was.  I was kind of worried the THP would take a lot of the fun out of it, but I managed to avoid them and had a really great time.  I really can’t say they affected me at all.  The times when they were out the road were so busy it would have been hard to enjoy the road anyway.  While I was there they did seem to be pretty decent.  I kind of forgot about them on Friday on my way out and came around a turn to find two of them pointing right at me in a pulloff.  I looked down and found that I was going over 50mph.  There was no response from them.  I think you draw a lot less attention to yourself if you have a quiet motorcycle and you are not spinning the engine up.  I suspect if they can hear you coming from a mile away it kind of gets them all worked up.  Even if you are riding slow they are going to nail you because they have been anticipating somebody who is riding really fast. 

I switched to a Metzler Tourance again for this trip, and I did miss the sticky rubber, but the Tourance will last a lot longer and I am going broke buying tires.  The first week of October I plan to get with Fat Tommy and get a new front tire.  I’ll let everyone know how it goes.

We have a two day trip planned to Virginia at the end of the month.  If you don’t know about it you are not on the mailing list so click here and send me a message and I will bring you up to date and add you to the list.  This is going to be two days of the most spectacular riding you have ever done.  It looks like we might have a pretty decent turn out for this one.

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Deals Gap and Blue Ridge Parkway – 09/01/2007 – 09/09/2007

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I made this trip down by myself.  Since there was nobody else to talk sense into me, I decided to leave home at 4:00AM.  Normally I have no problem waking up for a motorcycle trip, but I sure was tired this time.  I did not actually get out of the driveway until 4:15, so I started the trip out 15 minutes behind schedule. 

I made great time on the way down.  No traffic, great weather.  There sure were a lot of police out in Ohio for the Labor Day weekend, but somehow I managed to avoid their radar.  Many others were not so lucky.  All was well until I got half way through Kentucky.  This is where I ran into a massive traffic jam.  There was a terrible wreck that just destroyed a big truck, and it really tied up traffic bad.  Even with the wreck I managed to arrive at the Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort around 3:30PM so I still managed to make the trip pretty fast.

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Category: Ride Reports

Life Flight chopper at Deals Gap

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[flashvideo filename=wp-content/uploads/2007/12/chopper.flv image=wp-content/uploads/2007/12/chopper.jpg /]

On the evening of September 1, 2007 there was a crash on Deals Gap. They flew in the life flight helicopter to take the rider to the hospital and I took this video of the helicopter landing and taking off from the bridge at Fugitive Dam in the dark.

Category: Ride Reports, Videos

Family Trip to the Gap and Law Enforcement

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I know it has been a while since I did an update, but with going to work, and riding motorcycles, and going on vacation it is hard to find time to update the site!

Last week we were at Deals Gap.  We lucked out and got one of the apartment rooms at the Gap so we did not have to camp at all!  It was kind of a bummer that we packed and hauled all the camping equipment with us all week.

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Vernes Response

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Ok, so I finish my update, upload to the server and I am about to go on with life.  I decide to check my email and here is one from Verne about the Deals Gap situation.  I am really hoping it makes no sense at all, because most of the emails I get make no sense and then I don’t have to continue updating the site, but Verne makes sense so I have to go back to work again.  Here are his thoughts:

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Category: Posts