Met up with a couple buddies and did my first true dual sport ride yesterday..... it was cold but we had a blast! I've been wanting to try this for awhile now and definitely glad I did.... it's really a lot of fun! We did everything from crossing creeks to climbing rocks, to tight, steep, and twisty dirt and gravel roads. to paved switchbacks going straight up a mountain..... definitely a little bit of everything!

We started out grabbing some breakfast and then heading out some local backroads, making our way up to this one road I had wanted to check out called Waterfalls Rd. And as the road name implies, it does indeed have a pretty nice little waterfall







At the end of that road, you shoot straight across the highway and it puts you right into our main destination for the day.... Richlands Rd. It's an old fire road that runs through the woods, that's more trail like than road. But it's an actual road listed on the map...... crazy! And it connects to another road at the end of it, so you can make a nice little loop. These pics were from my video, which I still have to upload..... I'll post that up later but it's loooong...... pretty much the whole ride

This was towards the start of Richlands





Aaaaand then the fun starts, lol







After Richlands we connected with the windy dirt road that heads back down the mountain..... jumped on the paved road and headed back up the mountain (in a different direction) up to the Blue Ridge Parkway



It started to get coooolllllddd the further up we got..... we didn't expect it to get quite that cold so we were a bit underdressed. But we continued on anyways. This was the air temp when we got to the parkway..... and the wind was blowing by about the same number, lol



It's hard to see in the pic, but the peak in the background is covered in snow



After warming our hands for a few minutes, we made our way back down the mountain. We stopped at one of my favorite little spots to eat along the way, to warm up and grab a little food. This is right up the road from my house..... really cool little place with a ton of history behind it (this place has been here since the late 1800's)



One of the guys that works there wanted to see the bikes so he came out and snapped a picture of us, and posted it on their FB page



It was getting later (and colder) so we all made our way back to my house, which is just up the road from here. All in all we did 78.2 miles for the day (and on one tank of gas, too!). Despite the cold, we all had a great time.... definitely gotta do it again soon :grin:

 

Then if anybody cares to watch any of the video....... it's long, pretty much a good chunk of the entire ride, and being my first time through there pretty slow too, lol. But feel free to poke around in it. The first bigger creek crossing is about 2 minutes in, and towards the end we're back on the pavement. Default video quality kinda sucks..... if you change it to 480p in the bottom right it helps out quite a bit