I know now why the Blue Ridge Parkway is known as “America’s favorite drive”. It’s scenic, it’s lightly travelled, and it’s well-maintained. Those three things that make for a pretty good bike ride too.

There were definitely some hills though. Despite doing 7200 feet of climbing today, I don’t feel too bad. Most of the way had fairly moderate grades. For my cycling friends back in Salt Lake City, I was reminded of the grade you might see at the top of Emigration Canyon — the part after Pinecrest.

There were so many highlights today, I don’t even know where to start. Well, maybe I’ll start at the beginning of the day. It was raining by the time we were ready to leave the motel, so we delayed our start for about a half an hour and the rain stopped. It cleared up shortly after we started and stayed nice all day until now. Now it looks like it’s going to rain again. How lucky is that?

Somehow, when we got up to the Parkway, we got ourselves turned around and I started riding back south. I started seeing things that looked very familiar, so I checked the signs at the next intersection and sure enough, I was headed the wrong direction. Kind of an ominous start, but it was just a couple miles and it gave me a good warmup on a flat stretch of road before having to start the 25 miles of climbing to the high point of today’s ride at Craggy Knob (5580 feet). Here’s a self-portrait I took of myself at the base of the climb:

About ten miles into the climb, I spotted a wild turkey with a rafter of poults.

Nearly every time we stopped at one of the scenic view parking areas, someone would ask what it was we were doing. We met people from North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. We gave them all a Dream Tour business card. There was a couple from Schaumberg, Illinous that had a very cute golden retrieve puppy named Moose. He really reminded us of our golden retriever, Truman, because of his breed and a mixed breed dog we used to have, Kirby, because of his color. We met another dog, Zoot, whose owner is a naturalist who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He and Zoot were out hiking the mountains, enjoying the spring flowers.

As I was riding today, I saw a pair of furry little creatures on the side of the road. I’m not sure, but I think they were hedgehogs, but they might have been groundhogs too. In any case, there was a pair of them.

I also nearly ran over some kind of a bird that I flushed out of the grass along side the road. Again, I’m not sure what it was. This time, my excuse is that I was going downhill at a fairly high rate of speed. By the time I had a chance to slow down and turn around, it was gone.

I finally saw a snake! A live snake, that is. I’ve seen a handful of dead snakes on the road, but this was a live snake. I didn’t threatened by it though. It was only about 8 inches long and not even as big around as a pencil, but it was definitely a live snake.

As for scenic pictures of the Blue Ridge Parkway, we took so many! Here’s a link to all the photos we took today:

Asheville to Spruce Pine, North Carolina photos

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