Day 1: (continued) We eventually got on Fort Valley Rd which parallels Peter’s Run and Taskers Gap which are options on the
BRT. However, since these trails are “technically” pay-to-ride areas, I choose to by-pass them having been on them before and knowing the amount of other dirt that was ahead of us over the next week. Not soon after passing Taskers, the
BRT does deviate off of Fort Valley and hits some nice little gravel roads running pass the quint-escential VA farms. Soon the route dumped us onto OLD 211 which is a nice long straight section of gravel along the ridge of a mountain where you can step it up a gear is you are so inclined. Old 211 eventually dumps you onto for-real 211 where we then rolled down into New Market for lunch. A stop at the Southern Kitchen restaurant saw us downing coffee and hot tea with our meal; it is amazing how even in 70 or 80 degree weather if you are soaking wet you can still be shivering cold. At lunch we also added our 6th and final rider, Mike, and were also joined for lunch by Pat, an old friend who lives in the area.
After a hardy lunch and leaving large puddles on the floor of the restaurant from our dripping clothes we hit the road again under the threat of the sun poking out from behind the clouds. Not too far down the road Gene indicated he needed gas again as the range on the TW200 was under 100 miles. The official
BRT routes takes great pains to avoid most major metropolitan areas and this was true to get around the town of Broadway VA. A plan was therefore devised where Gene would run into town to get gas and we would continue on the route around the town and we would all meet up again where the
BRT crossed a certain road. This sounded good in theory but in practice, I did not realize the
BRT actually crossed this certain road TWICE. Therefore, Gene was sitting at the correct spot and we were at the wrong one. Unfortunately, before I realized we were at the wrong one, a phone call to Gene had already told him HE was at the wrong one. What ensued was garbled cell phone messages and a lot of running around trying to find each other; pretty much the definition of a cluster-fk. Eventually it was so bad that some more messages were left to just keep running the route and we would meet at the end of the day in Franklin. This was a learning experience however, as for the rest of the trip no body was allowed to go anywhere by them selves, except for the bathroom!
Finally, after the Broadway gas debacle, the route headed into the mountains and gave us a taste of our first forest fire roads. Basically, these very unimproved dirt roads along with your standard gravel roads would be the a LOT of what we would be riding over the next week. However, not too far into our first fire road I realized there was NO one behind me and had to turn back to find the rest of the crew who were trying to work out a few first day issues. First, someone had loose bags that had to be re-secured, and then someone on distanzias decided to take a little dirt nap. Then, in the process of recovering from the dirt nap, the only fuel injected bike on the trip did not want to re-start; and this was all in the first 10 minutes of being on our first fire road. Eventually, some brilliant accountant figured out how to get the problem bike running; turns out being parked at a steep angle allowed the in tank fuel pump to be exposed and pouring the excess fuel from some MSR bottles into the tank made it fire right back up. The big comedy of this entire afternoon was that we eventually figured out the Gene and his little TW200 were in front of us on the route and is spite of our great-big 400 and 650 bikes, as a group we could not maintain an over all pace necessary to catch him! Eventually we all made it to Franklin, WV and checked into the Thompson motel. We got cleaned up and walked up to Fox’s pizza for dinner which was conveniently BYOB which tasted oh so good at the end of our first day of the
BRT.
Sam & Gene and a really good looking Honda at the Thompson Motel:
All the bikes:
