Blue Ridge Biking
By Janet & Jay Lehr
The Very Best Bicycle Adventure is at Your Doorstep . . . Well, Almost!!
For three of the past four years, we have shipped our bikes to Colorado to join 2000 other cyclists on the famous Ride the Rockies Tour sponsored by The Denver Post. It's a great adventure - the Rockies are amazing and many of the western towns we pass through in the week-long ride are interesting tourist attractions. But the trip is expensive, time intensive, and oxygen deficient! However, we love hills, so we kept going back.
Then, this year Al Moore, a prominent COP cyclist, told us to stay home and ride the Blue Ridge Parkway. Well, we listened and found that it is incredibly beautiful; the hills never end and the price is right. Thanks Al! You were so right that we now want to return the favor to every COP cyclist.
It was, in fact, the best dollar-for-dollar, mile-for-mile, hour-for-hour bicycle trip we have ever taken! We plan to go back once or twice every year until we have ridden up and down, forward and back, each and every one of the continuous 574 miles of the combined Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway, which begins in Front Royal, Virginia and ends just North of Cherokee, North Carolina.
We decided to do the distance of our first ride in brief two-day increments, with the potential of riding a century each day. There is lodging along the parkway approximately every 70 miles. We chose to begin our excursion at Afton, Virginia where the Afton Inn sits at Mile 0 of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is also mile 105 of the Skyline Drive through the Shenandoah National Park.
The drive from our home in Ostrander to Afton took less than seven hours. We left late on a Wednesday afternoon and were tucked in bed in Afton by 10:00 pm. At 7:00 am the next day, we were off for the ride of our lives moving south on the Blue Ridge for about 50 miles before turning back toward the Afton Inn. The scenery took our breaths away at the peak of every hill. Beyond each hill was another hill without a single flat mile intervening in the spectacular views of the Shenandoah Valley. Scenic overlooks with historic information marked every few miles of the journey. Riding during the week in July, we saw barely a dozen cars during the day, but many a slow moving motorcycle ogling the views as we were.
We were advised of the few services on the Parkway, so we carried adequate water in our Camelbaks and went off the Parkway for lunch in order to see a little more of native Virginia.
The hills varied in difficulty; some were very hard and some easy. However, all the down hills were sublime and non-threatening since the roads were clear and had gentle runs out before the next hill. Nevertheless, you gotta like hills a lot, because there isn't a place on the entire Parkway where a marble won't stop rolling!
Not knowing how difficult the terrain would be, we did not set a particular mile marker as our turnaround point. Instead, we just watched our time so we could be back at our motel in time for a swim and a great meal by 6:00 pm. The plan succeeded perfectly. We drove a few miles that night to Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of the beautiful University of Virginia, for a wonderful dinner at a quaint old inn known as the Boar's Head Inn.
At 8:00 am the next morning, we rode north into the Shenandoah National Park and paid a $5.00 fee to ride on the 105 mile Skyline drive with its 35-mile per hour speed limit. It was just like a super-wide bicycle path, but with views no old railroad path ever enjoyed. Here the scenic overlooks came so frequently, we could not cover near as much mileage as the day before. We enjoyed all the wildflowers - Janet is an avid gardener so she was overwhelmed, rock formations and historical facts. We also saw 2 black bears, a wild turkey, and a deer that posed to have his photograph taken.
We did make up some mileage by hitting the hills a little faster. We were inspired by watching Lance Armstrong attack hills the night before on the TV coverage of the Tour de France. Hey, if he could climb them at 16 to 18 miles per hour, we could climb ours at 10 to 12, and we did.
We returned to our hotel the second day in time for a short swim before setting off for home with a midnight ETA, which we met.
This trip was simply the most convenient, beautiful, and inexpensive yet challenging bicycle trip we have taken. We plan to return back to the Parkway for a couple of more days in the fall when the leaves are changing. Then, next year we will pick some more southerly places to stay and explore more of the parkway until we know every one of its 574 miles from both north and south exposures.
We imagine that weekend rides will have more car traffic, but with every one on the parkway there for the beautiful view they will all undoubtedly be as courteous to cyclists as we found the cars to be on weekdays. No one was in a hurry; they just wanted to keep their wheels on the road while enjoying the scenery.
We would be remiss if we did not mention that there are many trails along the Parkway in addition to the Appalachian Trail. Since we are also avid hikers, they looked very inviting. We hope the pictures of the breathtaking views will give you just a little taste of what is in store just a few hours from Columbus.
