Blue Ridge Parkway Trip – Day 6

Welcome to "Ride and Rally" with Fix My Hog. It's chilly. Little bit. We're going up today, Galax. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Galax, I don't know, Virginia tonight. Not a huge distance on the Blue Ridge Parkway, probably up and around, but we learned yesterday this whole detour thing but the good news out of that is- Going up, up, up. Bent mountains, we have learned, is a climb that we get to take today. Very curvy couple miles up, significant grade. Yeah, good grade, and two lanes up. So get outta the way, we are coming through. Lot of curves, and some high points to look for today, Lovers' Lane, I don't know, I'm not gonna remember them all. I don't know, but we're gonna put on our parkas. Yeah! And move! Here we go! I'm probably a third of the way up that mountain right now. And this truck lane just started which means we're getting to the steeper part, the curvier part, obviously, because they're giving room for trucks to get out of the way. This is an amazing part of the ride. So too bad about the detour. But the detour is what put us on this path. Can't wait to see your video! Back on the parkway again. Another, man, just an absolutely beautiful morning. You know, it's easy on the parkway to concentrate on the overlooks and those are crazy dramatic views of the mountains. But we've seen a lot of this too, driving through the trees, which has been, the canopy has been amazing. But then too, just these big, open, rolling fields. The parkway isn't always on the precipice of the overlooks. It's, I don't know, inland, if you want to call it that, sometimes and you end up in cool areas like this. And it's nice, it's a nice diversion. The overlooks are amazing but it's nice to see other stuff in the woods and the fields, I don't know. With the GPS looks like we can cross the street, loop around, and end up back on the parkway. That'll work. We're jumping off the parkway for just a little bit. It looks on the GPS like we can come up here, take a right somewhere, and loop around back onto the parkway again. It's kind of cool to see what's off the parkway. Lunch today at Rocky Knob something, well Rocky Knob Visitor Center, and then there's a gorge across the street. It's a gorgeous gorge. It's an 1800 foot drop to the valley over there. Oh, my phone is very crooked, but I'm not gonna fix it. Tilt your head, there. Phone is straight now. What's your report on our lunch break on day something, it's like day six of our trip, I think. This is a very- No day four or five, five of our trip. Sorry for interrupting. Are you done? Yes. It's a very interesting visitor center, I guess, campground, not a campground, picnic area really, in the heart of the mountain and in the trees and little off shoots everywhere, was really kind of kind of cool. We can't show you, so I'm trying to describe it but really cool little private picnic areas for everybody. And again, no one here. Nobody here. There are like we and two other people are here having lunch spread out over a 10 acre picnic spot. Yeah, yeah, pretty cool. So yeah, we've been very lucky on the whole, we've talked about it, the whole lack of traffic thing. We talked to some locals here a little bit ago and they said October 10th to the 23rd, Calarun is a parking lot. But other than that, not too bad. And then in the spring for the flowers, 'cause flowers are coming out. So like May and June, they said it's really crowded. So if that's what you want, and you're okay with that, cool. But we sure appreciate not having our front tire up against somebody else's bumper all of these days. Yep, we like to rip these up. So tonight we're headed for Galax. We have a couple stops along the way Lover's Leap and maybe Mabry's Mill and Groundhog Mountain or something like that. I don't know, gotta look. There's an agenda, sorta. I just follow. You do not. We're gonna do just a little bit of a diversion today. We wanna get off the parkway and head for Lover's Leap. It's supposed to be a amazing view. Not all that far off the parkway so it's not gonna cost us much time and definitely worth looking at. So here we are at our intersection, that'll jump us off the parkway for a bit and head for Lovers' Leap. Well, that's kind of cool. There's another view of Lovers' Leap. What it looks like from the pike. Now we're gonna head back to the parkway and keep going south. Charlie and I are at Groundhog Mountain. Groundhog Hill. Groundhog Mountain. And we're up in a fire tower. Here's your 360 with my mug in the foreground. Elevation here, I think was it 3000 feet, again, or so? So one of the things that's cool are the, they've got a little display here of wooden fences. Charlie and I are both woodworking guys. So I gotta turn the camera on. I'll show you what I'm talking about there. Wood must be a really abundant resource around here or was when people were settling this because there are so many wooden fences and by us in Wisconsin you just wouldn't go to this extent when you're doing farm fence. Barbed wire is a good thing. It's a little bit like out east where all the fences are stoned cause that's what they got. Charlie, where do we find ourselves now? Blue Ridge Parkway. Yeah, sure. More specifically, yes, that's true. We're at the Blue Ridge Music Center, which they had a gift shop, which was cool. And unfortunately the music for the day had already ended. We got here too late for that. But this is about another about a hundred mile day for us, an easy day on the parkway. One of the things I wanted to point out we've talked about, we feel good, and we're having fun and- Right, right. At three o'clock today, we took a nap. We were at, were you embarrassed that I told everybody? I don't nap. We laid, we rested. We were at Groundhog Mountain and we were both kind of, eh. And so we just kind of laid low for about half an hour. On the Grassy Knoll. Yep, on the grass. It was literally called the Grassy Knoll. And had some water and a snack and just kind of took it easy. And then I think, I don't know, I felt great. Like just that little bit of downtime was enough to perk me up again. And thinking through today, once again, the weather. Spectacular. It's just amazing for us. We did learn a few fun facts about the parkway. You were talking to those people more than I was. When is it most crowded again? Oh, October 10th to the 27th. For fall colors. Right, and in the spring from May to June, it can get crowded, late May to early June for the flower bloom. Yeah, but they said in between, it's typically really, really quiet and that's, and Charlie and I have mentioned a couple times how great it is. In two days we've had to pass maybe four. Yeah, eight, 10 cars. Eight or ten slower vehicles, which in 220 miles of driving ain't bad. So the parkway being quiet is a wonderful thing. So just again, as you're thinking about coming here, plan accordingly, if you wanna have that advantage. Very cold this morning. And we kind of toggle back and forth, like warm clothes on, warm clothes off, warm clothes on. When you stop and stand in the sun you're sweating. But when you got on a bike and start cruising, you get in the shade, which there's a lot of canopy, that changes the temperature a lot this time of year. So tonight we're in Galax, Virginia, we're doing our clothes here. We're just miles, a few miles from the hotel. And then tomorrow we're off from Galax to Boone which is gonna be another great day. They've all been great days. Hey, absolutely, and I don't know if we've mentioned it, but today is September 24th so. Yes. So as far as when we're here. Oh, you're right. That's very smart. Yeah, what our real timing on the trip is, yes. It's recorded, I said, you're very smart Pipe down. Yeah, that's great. No editing that out. Third week of September is when we're doing this. And we're both thrilled that we just, it's dumb luck. My self-employed work schedule, his self-employed work schedule. This is the only two week period with travel time on each end that we both had. So it was just dumb luck we got here now, but yeah, it's worked out absolutely great. Yep. The other thing I was gonna say is day by day so far I have not yet felt like god, can we just get to the hotel? You know, like even on the rainy days on the highway, all of that was, you know, there were cool aspects to it. Adventure. Yeah, that as well, and embracing the suck. But I think that's a neat part of this is that we have two more days on the parkway. And I'm not feeling like, oh crap, we have two more days on the parkway. And they keep telling us, it's getting better, it's getting better, keep going, it's getting better. And we went from north to south. So that being said, you know. We'll see what we see. We're still, the highest point on the trail is still south of us. So it is another good thing to evaluate on your part of which direction do you wanna go. And you don't really have to do the whole parkway. We're doing the parkway as an experience. But if I was to come back, I might pick a section of the parkway and work that section and not take- And more deeply explore that part of it. We did a little boondocking today, very little but a little bit of boondocking. Locked it in four wheel drive, or two wheel drive. And two feet, duck walking over the gravel. No, we actually didn't have to duck walk. All right, anything else? I think that'll do it. All right, we're off the Galax for our hotel there. And then tomorrow's another day, I think. Hope so.