A couple minuets down the road I find a little dirt side road that goes deeper into the woods and take that. Pretty soon I find what looks like an atv trail and pull off the road onto that maybe 20 feet and start setting up my hammock. It seems I was not the only one that thought this was a good place to hang, there is remnants of burned wood and a whole lot of beer bottles lying about. What it is it with people and littering is it so hard to have a little respect for your environment or the next person that comes through?
As I am setting up 3 or 4 pickup trucks come through kind of odd for a road that small. Then one pulls over 30ft away from me and sits there and continues to sit there. I am kind of worried that they are a) some kind of park police that want me to move or b) that they are the owners of the beer bottles and I am in their drinking spot. Well, they can probably see me hiding in the trees with my big blue and white bike I should probably go say hi.
I walk over and the tinted window rolls down showing two big guys that look a little confused and not entirely friendly. Maybe I am better hidden than I thought, oh well to late now. I say hi, explain I am camping in the forest and thought they might be rangers. They say no, they just came to sit here for a while. OK then, they seemed a little old to be pulling their pickup off an old dirt road for some alone time…
Backwoods Virginia is weird, I don’t think entirely comfortable here. Needless to say, I slept with one eye open.
During the night the wind picked up and when I woke in the morning it was quite cold.
As I was packing up another pickup pulls up and parks. What is it with this spot? Time to go say hi, again. I am about to walk out when he pulls down his pants. Thank god I’m not any closer, I think I will wait until he has finished changing. I continue packing up for a couple minuets and try again, this time he is fully dressed in camo. He recommends a cool place down the road to get breakfast and heads off to go bow hunting for some deer.
The rest of the day went without a hitch it even warmed up enough that I turned my grips off for a short while.
The Blue Ridge Parkway is a really beautiful ride, not nearly as many pullouts as Shenandoah but also not as many tourists, a trade I would make any day.
I had decided to try out Airbnb for the night and found a cheap place about an hour south of Roanoke. It was hosted by a very nice couple from Mexico and Russia respectively they had a very cute miniscule dog that probably weighed 10lbs but was surprisingly well behaved for a little yapper (personally I prefer my dogs 10x that size). They even made me supper and breakfast. I felt a little uncomfortable intruding into their home and like I got too much for the $30 I paid, once you figure in food I imagine they don’t make very much.
The next morning, I left around 11 and headed east for a friend’s house in Durham.
The scenery quickly got flat and boring and my speed picked up.
I didn’t want to get to Durham until evening, so I pulled into a little café bakery and did some work for a couple hours. The food was very good, but when I ordered coffee and looked for the creamer the only thing they had was Nestle powder. WTF? That’s not cream. When I spend $3 on a cup of coffee I expect cream that you can at least remotely trace back to a cow. The coffee was actually quite good, so I drank it without cream.
