The morning at the campground was obviously still cold so we decided to stay an extra hour to let things warm up a bit. We figured that while we wanted to get to Charlotte as early as possible, it wasn’t worth being miserable on the road. As the sun’s rays started to get stronger and burned away the fog and clouds, I crawled out of my sleeping bag and packed everything up. It was still a bit nippy, so we took the precaution of wearing our rain gear as another layer.
From our camp site, there appeared to be one road south towards the start of the famous Dragon’s Tail road. Little did we know that it was a fantastic road along the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It was a nice warm up for the actual Deal’s Gap road, which surprisingly only had one police officer posted up at the beginning. Another nicely surprising thing was that all of the Adopt A Highways in that area of Tennessee were adopted by various Tennessee motorcycle groups.
A disclaimer for Deal’s Gap, also known as the Tail of the Dragon, is that we really didn’t speed more than 5-10 over the speed limit. The road was quite a bit of fun, but I’m not usually a fan of hairpin turns because I like to keep momentum. There were many types of corners on this road to enjoy though. I was a little surprised that there were so few other bikers out there. I had imagined the road to be very crowded, but I suppose that going on a weekday morning made it sparse. The traffic also appeared to mostly be coming from North Carolina to Tennessee. The minimal traffic didn’t stop three different people from posting at corners with cameras so that they can sell photos on the internet. I’ll have to look at the sites to see if our pictures are okay. It’s hard to look cool when you’re bundled up in a bunch of layers.
At the end of the stretch we stopped in at the well known Deal’s Gap Resort for gas and a bite to eat. Their chicken salad sandwich was surprisingly good, but the chicken was chopped up a bit too fine. We were able to talk with a few other bikers there and everybody was quite friendly. They also have a tree of shame with parts hanging from it that were taken from all the wrecked bikes on the road. I decided not to take a picture with the tree of shame because we still had a number of mountain road miles to do that day. I didn’t want to jinx myself.
Rolling into Charlotte, we were greeted by my brother Adam, sister in law Norma, niece Sophie and new baby nephew Colin in their front yard. We ended up going to Mac’s, a great BBQ joint. All in all it was fantastic spending time with them and especially getting to meet Colin for the first time. The day was pretty great overall.
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