After doing a little bit of painting and stuff for our "reclaimed ceiling tile kitchen ceiling project" I decided it was necessary to go out and gas up the scooter for the coming week. A lot of our neighbours seem to do their gassing up on a Sunday evening, either on the way to or from Church, so I thought 2:30 in the afternoon would be a good time to go. People would be in that flux time between services, either napping or lunching.
As I was riding down the mtn. to Roan Mtn. I saw a familiar scooter coming towards me on the other side of the road. The scooter was familiar but the rider wasn't, I was expecting to see my buddy Joel, however Chris, Joel's room-mate, was the one riding the scooter today.
Anyway, it turns out that room-mate Chris is a pretty cool guy and he is up for a quick ride around town and country. Told him I was gonna gas up and I would meet him back at Joel's house. When I met him at Joel's he was all ready to go(even put a helmet on!), and we set off uuuup the long road to Carver's Gap. It's about 12-14 miles of steady uphill climbing that is boring going up but awesome coming back down.
As I said, boring as all get out on the way up because we rarely hit more than 40mph, but..... The good thing about riding on the first few good weekends of spring is, you get to smell all the fresh cut grass, feel the warm air pockets as you ride through them, and you can smell peoples dinners cooking on the BBQ grill. There is also that brilliant smell that always jolts me into realizing that I live in a foreign country, skunk. Doesn't matter if it is close by and strong or miles away and faint, it is, to me, a truly American smell.
And one of me on the same curve.
One of the cool things about having someone along on the ride with you, is that you can take pictures of each other coming round corners. It took a lot of reconnoitering and backtracking to get the right corner and the right position to take the picture from. I think we did okay for a pair of amateurs.
A zoom-in from the previous picture.
After zooming to the bottom of the hill we took another of my favourite back roads, the old railroad grade road, which parallels Hwy 19E going out of Roan Mtn. Chris really enjoyed this road as he had never been on it before(even though he grew up right in this area).We followed the road to where the blacktop ended, then we rode over the dirt mound barricades that had been placed to stop cars from going any further down the old railbed.
The way became rocky and bumpy pretty quick and you really had to choose where you were going to put your wheels. Oh, did I mention that by this time we had swapped scoots and Chris was now riding mine. His first time on a scooter with gears, he got the hang pretty quickly. Must be nice to be young and have an agile brain!
Here's Chris, dirtbiking my Vespa.
We went to the end of the dirt path, even riding through some really nice mudholes, then parked the bikes up and took a little hike across the old railway bridge and through the tunnel. I think Chris is a 12 yr old at heart too 'cos he had no problem just scooching around the riverbank looking for cool rocks and old glass etc, etc.
Eventually we realised it was 6:30 and dark would be in about an hour. At 2:30 I had told my wife I was "just going out for gas, be back in a bit", luckily for me she is very understanding, but it would probably be good to be back before nightfall.
We retraced our steps back to the bikes(always a sigh of relief to see they are still there), jumped aboard and headed home. As Chris peeled off to the right to head home we gave each other a wave. We had already swapped numbers, so now I have two riding buddies. I carried on going straight up the road to "our house" and arrived home before dark, to a kiss from the missus and a nice cup of tea.
All the best to all,
Superscooter.
