Another beautiful day on the Blue Ridge Parkway! On our previous ride (last Sunday), we shared the Parkway with A LOT of Memorial Day weekend sightseers. Today was a a huge contrast to that. Not much traffic at all.

A week or so ago when I was searching for information about the Blue Ridge Parkway, I found a web site (http://www.cibaride.org/articles/features/bluerdge.html) that says in a typical 10 mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, you can expect about 800 feet of climbs. That was pretty much right on the button today. At the end of today’s 62 mile ride, I checked my cyclometer and it read 4962 feet of climbs.

We crossed the border into Virginia today! Virginia is the seventeenth state that we’ve covered in The Dream Tour. Here’s a photo from today showing the Blue Ridge Parkway sign as you cross the border.

As the ride progressed today, I noticed that the terrain got less mountainous and the the slopes more gentle. We’re entering a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that’s fairly flat compared to what we’ve seen in the past few days. With the gentler slopes, we’re also seeing more farmland. From our map, it looks like we’ll have these smaller, gentler slopes until we reach Roanoke, Virginia. Just north of that, we start a climb to 3950 feet and the highest point on the Parkway in Virginia.

Here’s a link to all the photos from today’s ride:

Jefferson, North Carolina to Fancy Gap, Virginia Photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 3:15 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. 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.