What was really nice about Devil’s Backbone Campground and Brewery, aside form the brewery feature, was the bathhouse. We both had nice hot showers in the morning before getting back on the road.
We did the usual tear down, pack up, and load ritual and were ready to head out when Dan got to do a FaceTime with Daisy the dog.
Next, it was 100 miles of beautiful scenery and twisty roads. The road does follow the ridge of the mountains and many times I could look both left and right into a vast valley that stretch for miles to the horizon. Going from one ridge to another takes us downhill to a “gap,” all of which are named, and then back uphill to another ridge. The road is in great shape and I will admit that we probably exceeded the 45 mph speed limit from time to time. Many of the curves that are labeled advising to reduce to 30 mph, which are easily handled on a motorcycle at 40-45 mph. We noticed that the negotiating and focussing on these makes the miles and time just fly by.
There are MANY overlook pull offs along the way and we took advantage of some of them. I shot video with my dashcam but, like I mentioned in my last post, doing the post-production is complicated on the road but I’ll try to insert what I can.
Along the way we went through a tunnel. Dan shot video of me coming out of it.
We got off the Parkway in Roanoke, VA for gas and lunch. We stopped at a Sheetz and Dan showed me the process for ordering custom burritos at one kiosk and paying at another. Before you know it, they call your number and it’s lunch.
It seemed that after Roanoke, the road calmed down a bit and the dozen twisties per mile gave way to longer, sweeping curves and lots of straightaways through scenic farmland. We did a stop at Masons Knob and while taking a break a few motorcycles went by. We’ve only seen a few on this route but it’s a weekday and still early in the season.
It wasn’t much further along before we hit the detour. I’d read about a new bridge closing the parkway but didn’t take note as to how long the detour would be. The signs got us off the parkway between Mt. Airy, NC and Sparta, NC. When we got to Sparta we decided to get gas and look at the map for possible camping options. The problem was that now we really didn’t know where we were in terms of the parkway and where we’d get back on it so we just decided to continue on the detour until we were back on the route.
When we arrived, the office was closed so I did the late arrival registration and picked a tent site. It was sort of confusing to figure out which price we fell under. We just wanted a tent site and the menu had several types so I just picked one that their message board said was available and when we rode over there it had a shelter and electricity. I’ll sort that out tomorrow. We had two RVers tell us we were in for trouble as a big storm was supposed to arrive overnight but we got our tents set up, fired up our stoves, and enjoyed dinner under dark skies and calm weather.
And, yes, it stormed overnight. Very high winds and lots of rain accompanied by thunder and lightning. Both of us stayed dry in our tents.
It was a 314 mile day.
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