One of the bucket list items done:
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| Tail of the Dragon |
I rode the "Tail of the Dragon" – a section of US 129 just East of Knoxville, TN. It's a really fun road to ride, with 318 curves in 11 miles. It would have been really awesome with less traffic though. There were some cars, but these generally pulled to the side when a motorcycle approached from the rear, the "bigger" hurdle were other motorcycles, namely big touring bikes from Harley Davidson, sometimes in groups of 5 to 8 bikes. A single bike is easy to pass, the groups have been rather annoying since they were really slow and didn't pull over because they were not aware of someone following the last one in the group (and probably didn't realize how impressively slow they were).
On the other hand, these guys are tremendously skilled at slow speed cornering, I was nearly falling over trying to go the same speed through some of the turns. I stopped a few times to let them get ahead, but in the end they were so slow, it took only a dozen curves or so to catch up again. One of the sections I rode twice because I really liked the left/right changes and I had one of these groups in front of me the first time.
But anyways, it was fun, but not something I'm going to repeat, the road is nice, but not nice enough to deal with the other traffic.
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| At the "Killboy" store, a photographer selling shots from riders on the Dragon | |
I got some stickers, and that was it.
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| Great Smoky Mountains |
Since I'm staying for two nights in the same hotel in Knoxville, I took the case off and put the bike into "hooligan mode" for today – with the master hooligan still on board:
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| Side Cases off |
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| The Hooligan |
It's really a beautiful area. I continued on "Moonshiners 28", a faster, less tight road and onto Cherohala Skyway, another road that is less tight and asks for faster speeds to be fun. There was a lot less traffic on these two roads and so I definitely had some fun there.
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| Along Cherohala Skyway, near Tellico Beach |
It was a great ride today.
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| Click the image to go to the real map |
Donkey riding shotgun! Ja, Neals Gap ist ein Klassiker.
ReplyDeleteDeals Gap, aber schon richtig, es ist ein Klassiker. Aber dennoch, irgendwie ist mir da zu viel los.
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