A Nice Dirt Surprise

(Oct. 13) For the most part, I've planned all of our routes ahead of time and on all roads I'm not familiar with, of course. Well, I did discover that one of my maps was transposed as I sent it to my GPS and was a duplicate of the route we took the day before. And I might have been a little ambitious in some of my planning. We didn't have time to go to New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, plus the rain kind of slowed us down.

We got up this morning and moved on from Greenbrier River Campground to head to our next one. I wanted to get there quickly since we had a ride planned for that day as well. But we started out a little slow.

It was a beautiful campground and we were the only ones there for the most part, so the dogs were able to hang out without leashes, which they loved. We were headed to Hungry Mother State Park near Marion, Va. After a Starbucks break, we finally arrived there at about 1:30. I had originally planned a 160 mile route for the day, but no way that was happening if we wanted to be back before dark.

We had another day of rain as well, so I re-planned the route using an old-fashioned map to a nice short 90-mile route which included highway 16, a great road that someone had told me about once before but I had forgotten. The park had great maps with motorcycle routes which helped in planning. So, the GPS became just a map.

Old-fashioned GPS

Route for Day 3

The surprise came about 2/3 through the ride when our road turned to dirt. We crossed over a mountain on about 10 miles of gravel. While that slows us down, that's what having BMW GS's is all about. It was so much fun. Here's a close up of the dirt road.

Once we recognized on the paper map what a dirt road looked like (wasn't on the legend), we looked for those the rest of the week, which pretty much meant the planned routes went by the wayside.

Here are a few pictures of hwy 623 (dirt), or Burkes Garden Road.

The ride continued to be pretty awesome after the dirt road, despite the rain. We reached elevation 3460 ft.

Beautiful Fall colors.

We made it back well before dark and drove the truck back into town for dinner. We ate one meal each day at a restaurant and cooked all the rest of the meals at the campsite. Our site at Hungry Mother was also beautiful and very quiet. It's great camping in the middle of the week during the school year.