July 7 - Roanoke, VA to Pine Grove, PA - 415 Miles

This day's ride covered about 235 miles on the combined parkway, so combined with yesterday's ride of 390 miles, the complete length of the Parkway / Skyline Drive was about 625 miles!!  We don't know how many curves are covered in that length, but it certainly is way up in the thousands.  What a great experience on a motorcycle!

It was a beautiful day, and we again marveled at the gorgeous scenic forest and mountain views as we rode along the ridges.  The Parkway road doesn't always stay on the ridges, but goes up and down along the sides of the ridges also.  However, the road is always way above the surrounding territory so that one continues to get panoramic views.  We went through more tunnels, and the total came up to 28 for the whole parkway.  So the day's ride was really a treat.

This next item is in the category of "You meet the nicest people when motorcycling".

We had ridden about 70 miles from Roanoke when we found the "Otter Creek Restaurant" along the parkway (one of the few restaurants found on the parkway), and turned in to have a cup of coffee.  As we were parking our bikes, two other motorcyclists came in, so we went over to compare notes.  Frank was on a Harley, and Richard was on a "Boss Hoss".  (A "Boss Hoss" is a custom motorcycle with a automobile V8 as the engine - what a machine!!)  Richard and Frank were local riders, a business man and a dentist, living about 25 miles from there, and this was their favorite restaurant for a morning ride and a late breakfast.  They invited us to join them, and we did.  We had a nice time, comparing Virginia riding with New Mexico and Ohio riding, along with some of the other places each of us had ridden.

Now for the "Wildlife Report"

This was the second day in a row that we saw quite a bit of wildlife.  First a deer ran across the road in front of Deane, but not so close as to be a potential collision threat.  It was about 25 yards in front of Deane's bike, so was easily avoided.  Then, as the two of us came around a blind corner, two more deer were just standing on or near the pavement.  We slowed immediately, and avoided them also.  Finally, Norm saw two more deer, up on the inclined shoulder of the road.  They jumped off into the forest, so again no problem.  We could see that the forest is so widespread and dense along the sides of the Blue Ridge, that many deer must live there.

After we had ridden the 235 miles on the combined parkway, it was late afternoon, so we jumped on Interstate 81 to ride on from Virginia into Pennsylvania.  In the process, we crossed a small part of West Virginia.  We hit rain, so stopped and put on rain suits.  The 18-wheelers were thick as fleas on that interstate, and so we had quite a ride in the rain.  As if that weren't enough, we had used a computer program to estimate our mileage for the whole day, and found that the ride to where we had made the motel reservation, north of Harrisburg, PA, was about 50 miles longer than we planned.  (The computer program didn't know how to handle the length of the curvy Blue Ridge Parkway.)  We wound up getting to the motel at 9 PM, after starting on the road at about 8 AM!  Aw well, all in a day's motorcycle touring.

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