Mt Pisgah and the blue ridge parkway what a great place to be lost.

Today's blog post starts with a picture from last night entitled if you can't beat them join them.

Starting to think that North Carolina doesn't know how to do anything but be pretty. Today's ride started 2 1/2 hours from my campsite at the top of Mount Pisgah. My new friend Marko agreed to meet me at 11 o'clock for an 87 mile jaunt around the Blue Ridge Pkwy. Two and a half hours may seem like a long way to go to start a bike ride but everything is so gorgeous around here I just call it sight seeing.

That's Mt Pisgah. With the ride loaded into my new Garmin we set off intending to do 87 miles at 11,000 feet of climbing. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn and that's when the fun started.

Yep, we're lost and out of water. Marko was ready to start drinking water from the side of the road but I had other plans. Giardia didn't sound like the answer so we went and talked to the old man who was mowing his fields with a brush hog. No luck on directions but he did have some icy cold well water from 600 feet down "so cold it'll make ya wanna slap your granny" so we sat and chatted with Clyde for a while and drank our fill and loaded our bottles.

When you're lost it seems like a good idea to just ride back and forth geeking for the camera. We headed off in the way that looked right since going back to the original route would've turned the ride into 110 miles and we would've had to re-climb a monster ridge that we had just come across. The road we were on was empty, no cars at all until along comes a sheriffs deputy who I waved down. I just wanted to make sure that the new route we were headed on wasn't going to turn into a crazy gravel road. When he found out where we were headed he just shook his head. He then said let me save you a few miles and directed us to take this turn and that. The route he sent us on was similar to the one we had but went up and over a mountain instead of around it. The new route was simply beautiful. It took us past some beautiful farms and one really cool Beaverdam which I had to take pictures of for Kimberly.

My new wing man was pleased with the alternate route that was thrust upon us. It was gorgeous and ended up being 86 miles and 10,500 feet of climbing. There was plenty of really cool stuff that we would've never gotten to see if we had made the right turn and we got to meet Clyde. Even though Marko did 115 miles yesterday with something like 11,000 feet of climbing he was right there with me all day today.

"There's no need to fear! Lucky is here!"
It seems like no matter what happens or how plans change as long as I'm on lucky everything works out well.

At the end of the ride, we cleaned up and went to the restaurant near where we parked. The food was delicious and well deserved. The views were of course, spectacular.