Dennis Rides – Motorcycles & Bicycles

Updated the “Visited States” map since I didn’t take any pictures.

Wandered around West Virginia today, some pretty awesome roads. The secret is to turn any time a sign says “No trucks, Your GPS is wrong.” – that usually ends up somewhere interesting.

There’s still quite a lot of coal mining activity, I must have passed at least 20+ loading areas with huge mountains of coal.

Most of the secondary roads were obviously created for mine routes, so they are twisty and turny with lots of 10 to 20 mph turns. Best part? They’re all posted 55 mph. Unlike TN and NC with their ridiculously low limits.

Unfortunately you have a 50/50 chance of getting stuck behind coal trucks going very slow. You also need to wend through all the little villages between each fun section. But once the coal dries up, WV gonna have some awesome motorcycle roads!

After that I hopped on the slab to make some time, and then joined some secondary roads to get into Virginia. Apparently mowing is the #1 hobby of this part of VA, because every house seems to be on a large, grassy plot. Everybody was out on their riding mowers mowing away.

I stopped early again today because I couldn’t face the horror of afternoon Washington DC.

Tomorrow I am going to try to outrun the weather and do the cruddiest part of this whole ride – the DC-philly-NY drag.

Audio book: Twin Towers. Finally Serkis doing Gollum! And he’s really into it, I think Jackson must have told him to tone it down for the movie. He’s even more Gollumy for the book reading!

Rode the infamous “Tail of the Dragon” today and looped back along the Cherahola skyway.

The dragon is fun but short, and crazy low speed limits. But it was my favorite type of road: empty and dry and no cars. Only 2 vehicles passed me on either the dragon or the Cherahola skyway.

Since it was a 120 mile loop, I was able to return to the hotel for breakfast and then headed up  north through the mountains. Today finally felt like a real motorcycle day instead of just interstates and cities.

Sadly I think the time zones and bad sleep were finally catching up to me, so I cut it short today and landed in Pikeville Kentucky. Probably a roughly 400 mile day. Unfortunately I was a little too early to attend Hillbilly Days.

Tomorrow I’d like to make it to Delaware but I’m not sure where, getting through that stretch of states from DC past NYC is probably going to be cruddy.

Audio book: Just started the Taming of Gollum chapter, still no Serkis-Gollum!

Day 4 I went down to the French Quarter and checked that scene out.. what a crazy zoo! There was an annual festival going on with 20+ bands playing in random places. Tons of interesting characters and people walking around. Not really my scene, but I did eat a beignet and a muffaletta, so I figure I checked that off my todo list.

Day 5: original plan was to head to the coast and then cut back into Deal’s Gap. However the weather report was looking pretty good so I decided to just head straight there. I took a slight detour through the panhandle of Florida, and then headed north..

Now normally a cardinal rule is “don’t go through city centers” – but I figured.. eh.. it’s Sunday, maybe I can squeak through.. No way. Atlanta decided to close 3 out of 5 lanes on the major cross town freeway. It was a parking lot for miles and miles. This time it was my turn to hop on the back wheels of 2 other motorcycle hooligans. No way was I sitting in that and 86+ degree weather.

Also, the north bound freeway from Florida wins the prize so far as “most boring highway” (which is saying something) – it’s just an endless tree tunnel with nothing to see except crazy driving snowbirds from every new england state.

Once I got north, I took a detour into South Carolina along a “scenic byway” and then into North Carolina and Robbinsville, aka the start of “the tail of the dragon.” Total miles today around 760.. but that Atlanta traffic really took it outta me. Total for the trip so far is around 3000.

Tomorrow will be a shorter day in miles, since I won’t be riding the “Dragon” in the dark, so I’ll be rolling out later.

Audio book: Twin Towers.. I forgot Serkis also did Treebeard’s voice.. and wow does it take a lonnnnnng time for him to get through all the Treebeard dialogue in the book! I’m still not to Gollum.

Forced myself to wake up at 5:30 to try adjusting to eastern time, and this was so weird it gets its own post.

So every year (excluding covid) for the past uh.. I don’t know.. 7(?) years, another crazy motorcycle buddy flies in 100 pounds of live crawfish and we sit around boiling and eating them (counter to counter airport delivery, so ~5 hours swamp to mouth.)

This year our annual event was scheduled for next weekend and I was obviously going to be traveling, so I said I’d find some when I was in LA and take a picture.

Last night I was walking to dinner and there was a dude boiling up crawfish in the parking lot next to a bar. So I asked if I could take a picture and mentioned our party thing. Turns out he works for a company that farms crawfish. Not just ANY company.. but the SAME company we use for the boil every year! And this parking lot boil was not a regular thing, either, it was just something he recently started doing.

So bizarrely, I was eating the same crawfish that will be eaten at the annual boil next weekend, just 1800+ miles away.

What a weird weird coincidence.

Dang this is gonna be tough to update things regularly, these are lonnnng days!

Day 1 was from Corralitos to Flagstaff, roughly 740 miles. Longest motorcycle day I’ve done so far. I felt pretty good up until the last hour. Started out at 43F and was a high of 87F going across the Mojave so that wasn’t too bad. Ended up meeting up with another motorcycle buddy who lives there, so no time for updates.

Day 2 was Flagstaff to Wichita Falls, TX with a brief detour into Oklahoma so I can knock that off without actually having to ride a bunch in Oklahoma.. sorry Oklahoma.

This was a long, long day.. and probably the maximum I can do. Roughly 860 miles. Plus I forgot about the time zone thing, so I rolled into Wichita Falls at 8 PM!

Once you leave the canyon areas of Arizona/NM, it is pretty dull. This part of Texas seems to consist entirely of cows, windmills and alfalfa farms.

I did eat some BBQ before checking into my hotel so at least I can say I ate BBQ in Texas.

Tomorrow I am hoping to get to New Orleans and I plan to take a day there to eat some food.

Motorcycle is humming along, if you’re gonna sit on a bike for 12 hours, the FJR1300 is definitely the bike for it!

Audio book: Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, narrated by Andy Serkis (aka Gollum in the films.)

Sooo, back in the ancient times of 2020.. I purchased a Yamaha FJR1300 with the plan to ride as many of the lower 48 states as possible in Spring 2021.

Oops. Some things came up where that didn’t work out, but after much delay, I’m finally going to head out.

As you can see from the classic “Visited States” map, I’ve never ridden much east of the Rocky Mountains.

I’m not really sure how much I’ll update this, and obviously it involves no bicycling since there’s a lot of miles to cover. But who knows, things happen on the road (weather, mechanicals, etc) and I might have time to update.

Hoping to leave this week, probably Wednesday.

I’m wondering if maybe this was overly ambitious. 8 hours on the motorcycle including dragging across all of Los Angeles being buffeted by winds and big rigs was pretty exhausting. Also, no place had restrooms open until I stormed a Mcdonald’s. Route to the hotel gave me look at Nate Harrison grade and it looks REALLY tough. Given my current riding shape (and body shape) tomorrow will be interesting.