Virginia

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Monday 12^th:

We left Blowing Rocks on a, beautiful, fine clear autumnal morning. Only a few miles out, our route took us onto a road that as usual was climbing. It was intermittently seal then gravel then back to seal. We climbed Mount Hebo on a winding sealed road with plenty of switchbacks getting to around 3800 feet. On the descent down the other side we came to Hebo the Village. Pretty small but very scenic.

Soon we were back onto gravel interspersed with sealed patches as,again we climbed to nearly 4000'. Here the weather was a bit more alpine-like with misty rain and the temperature had dropped. We stopped, had some breakfast at a country store and togged up for rain.

Dropping down from these heights you could say we were on our own road to Damascus. After around 70 miles we arrived into the town of that name, in Virginia. We had now completed the approximately 3300 kms we had planned to do on the TAT. We stopped here, changed our GPS routes onto the Mid Atlantic Back Country Discovery Route (Henceforth known as MABDR.) The BDRs can be investigated further, if you are interested at www.ridebdr.com. We also took off a layer of rain gear as it had fined up and was warming somewhat.



Out of Damascus, the first leg of the MABDR retraced the last part of the TAT we had just ridden. Around 10 miles out Ian (at the back) stopped and as per our system we waited for him for a few minutes then went back to find he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. We checked our information and as this area didn’t appear to be part of the Bermuda Triangle we figured maybe he had returned to Damascus as he may have left something there. Returning, we caught up with him and we found him looking for his backpack which he had taken off to disrobe some wet gear. Whenleaving he had forgotten to put it back on. Luckily, it contained a few items of value but no money or passport. None of the surrounding shops had seen or heard anything so we went to the local Police Station who were very helpful, as were other people (one guy driving his pickup around town to see if he could spot it discarded on the verge somewhere). Deciding if it eventually turned up, we could make arrangements to get it couriered somewhere, we pressed on into the first section of the BDR heading roughly North.

We rode into the neat and tidy town of Marion Virginia, where we stopped and had lunch. After this break we were back on some fantastic tracks through majestic forests and occasional farming areas. We passed some horse breeding studs and a few cattle and dairy farms (with stock) in this extremely picturesque part of Virginia.

After around 80 miles of this we decided we would jump off the BDR and find accommodation. Shortly thereafter we rode through a town called Pearisburg and found a basic motel with vacancies. We didn’t find out how basic until later! This place was a fleapit. Without going into too many details it was not a place to sleep between sheets that hadn’t had a thorough inspection. The upside was, there was a very good Mexican restaurant across the road where we had a good meal and an interesting conversation with the Mexican waiter. Then a walk through the town to find a motorcycle shop we hope to get tyres from tomorrow., Judging by the snow plough - see photo the must get some decent snow January through to March. Returning to our dump digs to spend the rest of the night hearing riff-raff & their kids running up and down outside, abusing each other and generally making a lot of noise.

We survived all this after having completed around 345kms.

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