Chris' Ramblings

- Tuesday – September 15, 2009 -

Today I was going to be covering a ton of miles so I knew it would be a long slog of a day. I got up and got packed pretty early. I was still on eastern time, but in the central time zone. I went to check out and Paige at the front desk asked where I was heading. I told her and she suggested that I take the Lookout Mountain Parkway. I was going to be headed in that general direction anyway so I figured why not. The section I would be hitting contained the largest canyon east of the Mississippi River. It was a rather foggy start to the day so my pictures didn’t work out that well but here goes.

The rest of the ride was more of the same around the other side of the canyon but the views were not as nice. After leaving the canyon I took some back roads and forgotten highways before hitting the slab into Birmingham, and on to Barber.

Once at Barber I tool a crap-ton of pictures so I’ll spare you most of them. They are all on my Smugmug page so you can check them all out there if you like.

You get the point.  They had tons of bikes, and Lotus race cars.  The place is a working restoration shop as well.  The first floor is off limits to the public but you can watch them working on new projects down there.  It really is a place you could spend all day if you wanted.  Oh, and if you ride there they do have a place to change out of your riding gear so you can browse around in comfort.

At this point I needed to think about a way to get back north.  I could go back the way I came but what fun would that be.  This is where traveling with a small laptop comes in handy.  I’d heard of the Natchez Trace Parkway, but didn’t know much about it.  However if I blasted over to Mississippi I could pick it up in Tupelo.  So off I went.  Again, it was very humid but not too hot so the ride wasn’t that bad.  I got off the highway one exit too early and ended up in downtown Tupelo.  Home of “The King” according to all the Elvis crap around.  I was a tad peckish and in need of gas so I stopped in the local Hardees.  We don’t have Hardees up here so the woman behind the counter thought it was funny I didn’t know what I wanted right away.  As luck would have it the Hardees had free wi-fi. Score!  I got on and talked to Beth for a bit.  She was going to help me arrange lodging for the night since it looked like a wet one, but I didn’t know where I would end up.  The parkway ends in Nashville but that was about 250 miles away and I had already done about 300 this morning.  Oh well, I’d have to call her closer to dusk and see where I was.  I hung out for a while at the Hardees since I looked outside and it was raining buckets.  Not little buckets either.  We’re talking 5 gallon paint buckets of water coming down.  It only lasted about ten minutes so I finished up hit the gas station next door and hit the road.

Well I made it to Nashville, TN.  The parkway was ok, but I think it’s geared toward putting along in an RV more than a motorcycle.  The speed limit is 45mph and I probably was averaging 70 or better the entire length and never once touched my brakes.  I don’t thinkI would make any effort to ride this parkway again.

I pulled over into a gas station to fill up and after that I called Beth and she fixed me up in a Hyatt that she had a free night available at.  While waiting for her to call me back with the details I fired up the laptop to get directions to the place from where I was.  Once I got settled in I made some routes up for tomorrow and called the wife on Skype, then it was off to bed, in a really nice bed to boot!

Click Here for Day 6.

Tags: Motorcycles

This entry was posted by cablebandit on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Road Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.