Day 7
Today is a pretty simple, but sweet day. At 8:30 all the VStroms should to be lined up at the front of the IronHorse for a big group photo of the bikes. Then us Canucks will head out and ride the Cherohala and have lunch at the Tellico Grains Bakery. At 4:30 there will be a slow race - I didn't sign up, but I've never seen one of these before and it should be fun to watch.
So we wake up early and get our bikes down to the front for a good parking spot. Slowly the bikes trickle in and by the time it's all said and done, I count 50 bikes there. That's pretty impressive since a bunch of people who signed up to the event late were staying at other locations in the Smoky's and some others had already left in the morning to go out for their long Saturday rides. I think they counted that over 80 VStrom riders attended the event, with some riding in from as far as Texas and Wisconsin.
The 3 guys who organized this rally do a really good job and put a lot of effort into it. Each night they had a big meeting with all the people there. They made fun of everyone they could and gave out lots of free prizes, had a consignment table of anything you brought to sell or want to buy, they loosely organized a bunch of paved and off road rides and much more. A couple of us Canucks thought it would be a good idea to see if Suzuki Canada could donate some swag to give out. The head of Suzuki Canada happens to live near one of us and delivered a box of around 40 VStrom shirts and a bunch of nice VStrom hats. I even got a nice pink one for my wife.
On the Friday night they asked whose bike had the most mileage on it that was put on by themselves. There were some bikes there that had well over 100,000 miles on them, but they had bought them used and didn't put on all the mileage themselves.
@V-Tom normally would have crushed all of us, but his current bike is still less than 2 years old, so it only has around 100,000km on it, even though I think he said he's done way over 700,000km on his various VStroms collectively. So as luck would have it my beat up orange bike had the most mileage that was all put on by me - it had just crossed over the 100,000mile mark on my way down to Deals Gap. They recognized this amazing accomplishment with a pair of big nuts, which I now hang proudly in my garage for all who enter to admire.
So now that the slow race is done, we gear up and head out to ride the Cherohala. I'm the only one riding a silly pace, so I stop to take this pic while waiting for the others to catch up.
And then I turn around and do my best Killboy impression with my iPhone and get a bunch of pics of all the guys coming around the bend behind me:
What an awesome day to be out riding the Cherohala. This is what good group rides are all about.
The guys are going riding elsewhere and I need to make a stop over at
Wheeler's Performance which is a great moto shop located right on the 129 in Robbinsville, because I still keep having some weird fuse issue that I want them to take a peek at. When I get over to Wheeler's, Ken (the owner) is sitting behind the counter with an ice pack on his neck. I've been there before and he's a really genuine and nice guy, so I now always try to at least stop in and buy something from them. There's one other tech there and apparently he's fully booked all day doing tire changes. I ask Ken what's wrong with his neck and he tells me it's from all the steel plates and rods he has in his upper body from crashing so many times doing motocross in his youth. Now it flares up often and he can't really move well as a result. My wife is an osteopath and registered massage therapist, but unfortunately it doesn't mean I know anything other than "Honey can you fix this knot in my shoulder?"
Ken still tells me to pull my bike over and he'll try to see what he can find out. He checks a bunch of electrical stuff and then we pop in a new fuse and voila, everything works as it should. He tests a few more things and it still works without blowing the fuse so he thinks I might be good to go. I ask him how much to pay and he says he didn't really do anything but jiggle a few wires so it's no charge. He spent about 30 minutes on my bike though and he knew which wires to jiggle, but he's firm on not charging me! So I buy a sweet 129 Wheelers t-shirt and some oil and we're good.
While at Wheeler’s, there was a guy from South Carolina getting new rubber installed. He's riding an Italian electric bike called
Energica that gets around 300-400km of real world range and the bike is pretty sweet! We talk for a while and he just bought it from someone in California for around $19k US, which he said was a good deal. His girlfriend is following him in a car as he rides around and since he knows where the superchargers are, he plans his twisty routes off that. Pretty amazing bike and an insightful guy to talk with.
I head back to the Ironhorse to meet up with the guys and we just relax and drink until the slow race festivities start in a couple hours.
Now I usually don't drink much in general and I've never ridden after having a drink, but since I was down here and feeling nicely buzzed right about now, I thought I should enter the slow race! I'll represent our country and make everyone proud! Who cares if I've never done one of these or even seen one before. Who cares if I suck at slow speed riding? What could possibly go wrong? So I chug back my drink, get all geared up, pumped up and I'm ready to represent!
Except the organizers strategically placed an alligator and a snake right beside the course and my fear of plastic reptiles coupled with the weight of a nation overcame me and couldn't stay in the lines. I did make it over the ramp, but fell into the moat.
I clearly did not have enough to drink, which I will remember for next time. Too bad NC is a 420 free state, otherwise I would have been in the zone
Tonight's the last night, so we enjoy hanging out and tomorrow we begin the trek north! The Foreign Legion from Canuckistan as we gather around VTom's mile munching machine: