Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

12742 miles in 76 riding days Map

I've been wearing the waterproof, fleece-lined cold-weather gloves that I picket up in Connecticut for the past month. Today was the first day I switched back to something lighter. It was nice and warm, even in the morning in Louisiana, and was well over 80 F in Texas. It feels good to be warm.

The plan was to ride from Alexandria, LA to Huntsville, TX today, but the roads were straight and the speed limits were high, so I found myself in Huntsville in time for a late lunch (it's nice to be back in Horchata country). It seemed silly to end the day there, so I called my hosts in Austin and made sure it was okay if I showed up early. They said it was fine, so I kept on riding.

I'm staying with my friends Dave and Amy (who you may remember from Beijing). They're heading abroad on their honeymoon in a few weeks, and wanted a housesitter. Coincidentally, I wanted someplace warm to hang out for a while and work on some projects. So I'm planning to be in Austin for a while. I suspect I won't be updating this journal much while I'm here, but we'll see.

I rode the last part of the Natchez Trace today. Actually, I backtracked a bit, taking a different approach road from Canton than the one I'd come in on. It put me a few miles further north, so I stopped by the cypress swamp again. I did a few more short nature walks along the Trace as well.

The wildlife has shifted further. I didn't see any deer or wild turkeys today, but I did see an armadillo! I think that's my first armadillo in the wild.

I kept passing snowy fields, and little drifts by the side of the road, which was surprising, since it was over 70 today. Of course, when inspected more closely they turned out to be cotton. Corn is no longer king.

I stopped for lunch in Natchez, Mississippi, and had some really good biscuits with apricot butter, and an oyster and spinach salad. I think this is the first time in my life that I've had cooked oysters and didn't think it was a waste of oysters.

Another day of riding the Natchez Trace. Mostly uneventful, easy riding. I'd been looking for a Post Office for a while, and finally found one in Tuscumbia, but it was closed for Veterans Day. I stopped for lunch in Tupelo, MS, and had the best fried green tomatoes I've ever had. I made one stop along the parkway for a short walk to check out a cypress swamp. Otherwise it was just riding all day.

The scenery was really pretty in the afternoon. The trees down here still have some leaves, and the parkway creates a clearing for the slanting light to shine through and hit the trees on one side of the road.

I picked up my bike at the shop this morning. The repair guy had been impressed by how well it was running, given the number of miles on it.

My first stop was at a cafe conveniently situated at the beginning of the road I'll be riding for the next couple days, the Natchez Trace (AMA #11).

Before the age of the Steamboat on the Mississippi, it was common for goods to be floated downriver on flatboats that were dismantled and sold for lumber at their destination (since it would be too much work to get them back upriver). The crew would then walked back to their starting point. The Natchez Trace was one of the routes they walked.

There's a parkway now that sticks pretty close to the route of the old Trace, with some turnouts where you can walk or drive along the old path. It's a peaceful road, at least right now. There's no commercial traffic ("Recreational Hauling Only") at all, and very light traffic in general.

I rode the parkway until sunset (which is annoyingly early, these days). I made some stops for short waterfall hikes and a visit to Meriwether Lewis's grave (he was the leader of the Lewis & Clark expedition and died under mysterious circumstances along the Trace.

While my motorcycle was in the shop for its 48,000 mile service, I explored Nashville on foot.

My first stop was Arnold's Country Kitchen, an unassuming BBQ place with a line out the door. It was delicious. The roast beef was great and so were the turnip greens, but I think the stewed okra was the best okra I've ever had. Yum.

I walked over to the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame. On the walk, I noticed that one of the adjacent blocks was cordoned off, and a bunch of people were watching cars arrive from behind barricades. It seems that the Country Music Awards are tonight. The barricades were a little odd, because nobody was actually stopping traffic across them. Which was a good thing, since I was on the celeb side and needed to get to the museum side. Maybe they tightened up security once the big name stars started arriving. Or maybe country fans are just polite enough to stay on the designated side of a barricade without enforcement?

The Museum was pretty neat. It did a good job of creating little areas of music with spiral-enclosed areas and speakers aimed down from the ceilings. You could hear things from a few feet away so you'd be tempted to move into one of the listening areas, but it wasn't too distracting because of all of the overlapping sounds. I'm not a country music fan, so a lot of the music and artifacts they were presenting didn't have associations for me, which was interesting. I liked that they had little capsule explanations of who each performer was, and what they were famous for. Without that, I would have been fairly lost.

Later in the afternoon I visited the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which had a variety of focused exhibits from Ancient Egyptian funerary objects to a Film Noir-esque sculpture-with-embedded-video-screens piece about a woman on the run. The highlight of the visit for me was actually the Frist Center itself. The lobby area has elaborate Art Deco decoration, and there are etched or frosted glass windows which give the feel of monochrome stained glass.

I went to a brewpub for dinner. There were some interesting beers, but the standout of the meal was fresh, hot soft pretzels. Really good.

I started the day out with a visit to Mammoth Cave. They're concerned about an outbreak of White Nose Syndrome that has been killing millions of bats, so they made me sterilize my boots and camera because I've been in other caves in the northeast with them. They wanted a complete inventory of the caves I'd been in in the last five years, but I only told them about the ones I've been in on this trip. We didn't actually see any bats on the tour, though. It seems they start hibernating in October.

The rooms in Mammoth Cave are definitely the biggest I've been in on this trip, and I think second only to one of the caves I visited in Vietnam. The formations in the part of the cave that we visited on the tour were less spectacular than the ones in other caves on this trip. Mammoth Cave has a solid sandstone cap, rather than porous limestone, so there's a lot less of the dissolving and redeposition that creates flowstone, stalactites, and other cave features. This leads to bigger rooms (because they don't re-fill) and walls that look more like plain rock.

It's supposed to rain tonight and thunder tomorrow morning, so I figured I might as well not ride tomorrow. Since I was planning to be in a major city tonight (Nashville), I found a motorcycle dealership that was willing to look at my bike on short notice. It's due for its 48,000 mile service, which is a major service. They'll have to check the valve clearances and examine pretty much every major system of the bike. I was vaguely hoping to delay this until I arrive in Austin, but that's at least 1000 miles away. When I dropped the bike off (fifteen minutes before the shop closed for the day), it was at 47,942.

I had dinner at a BBQ joint in downtown Nashville. I definitely liked the Tennessee-style vinegar-based BBQ sauce they had better than the Texas-style tomato-based BBQ sauce. Afterwards, I roamed the Broadway strip for a while. Considering that it was early on a Tuesday night, it was impressive that pretty much every bar (and two thirds of the storefronts on Broadway are bars) had live music. I ended up listening to three different bands. My favorite was the one with the fiddle and the pedal steel guitar.

Today was devoted to Bourbon touring. I took tours of the Woodford Reserve and Maker's Mark distilleries and visited the gift shop of the Jim Beam distillery.

It was interesting to see the contrast between the distilleries. Woodford has a spacious, quiet facility. They aren't producing enough bourbon to fill the space they have, and don't seem like they're in a hurry to scale up. Maker's Mark's space is packed, and they're planning to build two rackhouses (storage buildings where the barrels of whiskey mature) per year for the next five years. In the meantime, they're selling unaged "white lightning".

Both of the tours were interesting. Woodford uses rye for flavor (like most bourbons), while Maker's uses wheat. The difference was clear from the sour mash. Both distilleries let you dip your finger into the brewing mash for a taste. Woodford's mash is more sour and sharp, while Maker's Mark's mash is sweeter and smoother.

Bourbon country, the Bluegrass Region, is very pretty. Sure enough, there's an impressively full, green grass everywhere. There are enough trees to make the region not seem barren, but most of the area is fields. Many of them are fenced off and populated by horses. Streams and ponds seem plentiful. And the roads are pleasantly windy.

Today's goal was to ride US 129, "The Tail of the Dragon" (AMA Favorite #3). It's reputed to have more than 300 turns in the space of 11 miles. I didn't count, but I can believe it. These are not the wide, sweeping turns of a road like the Cherohala Skyway, but tight switchbacks. I scraped my footpegs more than once going around them. After finishing the route, I stopped at a souvenir shop (it's kind of funny how many of the roads out here have souvenir shops dedicated to the road) to pick up a sticker, and headed back along the Tail the other way.

The rest of the day's riding was less twisty, but still fun. The roads to and from the Tail were fast, with sweeping curves. I took the Foothills Parkway up to the Interstate. When I got bored of the Interstate, I found a "Scenic Byway" that paralleled it for most of the way and took that instead.

Waiting for the weather to improve seems to have paid off. I had excellent weather for my ride today. I rode down the Blue Ridge Parkway (#2) to its south end, with two pretty long diversions because the road was closed. In one of those cases there was a clear, marked detour. In the other, the ROAD CLOSED barriers that appear periodically along the road were simply closed without explanation. I asked some other bikers in the area which direction I should go at the nearest offramp in order to get to the Cherohala Skyway (#7). They pointed me left, but warned me that the Skyway would probably be very cold. Happily, they were right about the direction and wrong about the weather.

It was cool and crisp. Visibility was great, and the road was a lot of fun. Mostly sweeping curves, not tight twists. Good road surface. Lots of turnouts for slow traffic to let faster traffic go by. Most of the leaves have fallen in the section in North Carolina, though there are patches of color in the grey wintry landscape. The section in Tennessee is surprisingly colorful still. Lots of spectacular reds, oranges, and yellows.