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Friday, October 26th 2007

3:19 PM

He's BAAACCCK!

Modern Motorcycles

October 21, 2007

Blogs break. Data is lost. Computers forget. Well, I haven’t forgotten and I haven’t quit riding. I just haven’t had a way to write anything down for a while.

I have actually ridden quite a lot – for me – this year. I started in May on a cold check ride to West Virginia and Virginia with my oldest riding and otherwise very long time friend Phil. He rides the width and depth of the old USA and some in Europe. On this trip we were doing a check ride for his leading a group ride later in the year. As usual the pace is quick and it is daylight to dark riding … a little over 1000 mi. in two days … and fantastic roads.

The old Virago did great, but the tires were dangerously worn when we got back, so new Avons went on right away.

Around July 4, lovely wife, Faye, and I headed for one of my personal objectives … Lake Itasca and the source of the Mississippi River in Minnesota. Well, it was a bit much. The heat and pounding roads on a bike with very little suspension proved too much, so we cut the trip short. Next spring I’ll try again. We did have a great time though and saw a lot of Illinois, meaning a lot of corn and some soybeans. We also had some great views of the Mississippi River. We visited Amish areas and I came to understand and appreciate them a lot more.

Labor day weekend, having two days to work with, I headed to Mountain Home in the Arkansas Ozarks. This was a really interesting ride on roads I’d never been on. About 900 miles in the two days and a great variety of places and roads. Except for the heat it was perfect. But, hey, the heat was a given this summer. It never slowed me or the old Virago.

Just last week Faye and I decided to use one of my last two vacation days of the year to take a ride to the Cumberland Gap National Park in the corner of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. I’ll write down some specifics later. This was a great trip. One benefit of the long hot summer has been a slower transition into fall. Temperatures on this trip were perfect. A typical mid-October ride would have frost.

Today I took a little afternoon blast down to the farm (which is my brother’s and mine now that Daddy has moved out of that nursing home to a far better place). I visited some roads I haven’t been on in quite a while, mostly in Maury, Marshall, and Giles Co Tennessee. Again the weather was perfect and the old Vgo just devoured the road.




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