2022 Update

Welcome to 2022. Don and I are on the road again for our annual spring run to the mountains. Our beloved Haywood County North Carolina needs more time to recover from last year’s devastating flood so we are in Virginia this trip at the Willville Motorcycle Camp in Meadows of Dan. We have my nephew Jordan along again and hopefully he will be able to join us on some extended trips in the future.

What a past few years!?!? We keep hoping for a return to normalcy, but turmoil, pandemics, natural disasters just keep coming. On top of that, my work has decided to detail me out of town on a hard-to-predict schedule that has largely eliminated any weeklong trips out west as I am no longer guaranteed more than a stretch of 7 days off including weekends. At any rate, this won’t last forever and Don and I are already planning some epic journeys so please stay tuned.

Don has gone back to work at least part-time in the security alarm business. He also spent a couple of months in Alabama at his dream job, a professional motorcyclist! A friend of a friend had a contract with a major tire manufacturer bringing a new tire to market and needed real-world testing against the competitors. Don got paid to ride a bike all day six days a week. Come on, we all know he does that anyway! Hopefully this will turn into future opportunities to get paid for riding.

Meadows of Dan Virginia sits on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the southern part of the state. The name was given by the early English settlers for the beautiful meadows near the Dan River.

The New River Gorge Bridge was completed on October 22, 1977. At the time of completion, it was the longest steel arch bridge in the world, a title it held until 2003 with the construction of China’s Shanghai’s Lupu Bridge. It is currently the longest single-span steel arch bridge in the United States and the third highest bridge in the country. The bridge spans 3,030 feet, the arch is 1,700 feet, and is 876 feet above the gorge. Every year, it is closed for a day in June for people to base jump from it.