The Homestead Inn was a nice, safe place to wake up in. I made coffee and blagged some WiFi to feed you good people and record what my synapses will no longer persist. After a little light wrestling with WordPress, that insisted my updates had failed, please let me know if you see issues, I packed up and headed back to the ridgeway.
What a difference a day, and a night’s sleep, makes. My head was clearer and the nameless bike, I considered “Miss Daisy”, was running sweetly, she seems to like the thin air. The Blue Ridge Parkway gets more and more beautiful and higher as you go South/West. I make no apologies for the excessive panoramas, it is jaw-droppingly scenic, come here it is stunning.
I strayed from the path to refill the tank and grab a coffee but returned to the addictive lure of the un-straight and narrow. The job was a good’n I’d passed the highest peak and although the bike felt loose and the tick over is slowing, perhaps in sympathy with my heart rate or perhaps the thin air is making her wheezy, she kept on delivering.
The descent down through the trees was easy on us both and then suddenly, having crossed a small bridge over the Oconaluftee river where a fly fisherman was wading, we were there, the end of the road. A committee of turkeys to greet us and, for the first time in 469 miles no option to keep straight on without stopping.
I rolled on down through Cherokee to Bryson City that seemed to have more bars although no cathedral, which would have disqualified it from such status in the old country. Casting the die once more I found a room at the ‘Relax Inn’, a pleasant enough motel with spongy beds, and wandered back up to the Mountain Layers Brewing Company where a pub quiz was in full flow. I stayed for a couple or three very nice IPAs then found a bar on a corner on the way back that Google maps has missed where I met Jake from SC, a man with too many ex wives and VWs planning to move up to this area to get away from the heat, climatic not legislative.
Le Mans man 