Day Twelve: Blue Ridge Parkway and on to Manassas

Day Twelve: Blue Ridge Parkway and on to Manassas

If your coffee doesn't wake you up, starting the day driving directly into the sun on the Blue Ridge Parkway certainly will.

Tuesday was Part Two of our ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We'd crossed into Virginia as the end of the day on Monday and would continue to the Parkway's end and on to Manassas. I've come to love riding these byways in the early morning when the day is still quiet and sleepy and the sunlight is streaming through the trees. We were surrounded by the fragrance of new grass and wildflowers and a very different landscape than the one we'd experienced on Monday.

The Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia is at a lower elevation - 3,000 or more feet lower, so the peaks were less knife-like. The landscape was also different. While we'd seen nary a sign of civilization on Monday, Tuesday's ride offered farms and barns, grazing cows and fields with hayrolls waiting collection, plotted like a farm version of "Connect the Dots".

While we headed to the higher elevations, I could see images of farms flicker through the treeline like an old silent movie. Higher and higher we climbed, until we were literally driving through a cloud. At one point, we could see about five feet in front of us. It was eerie and amazing at the same time.  It cleared from the roadway, but the sky above us was still white, and would stay that way for the duration of the ride.  The clearing was short lived. The temperature flirted with sixty degrees, but it felt much colder on the bike. As we began our descent, we ran into it again, a thick misting on the road and the ridge, but the white surrounded us beyond the trees on the mountainside. The first overlook sign I could actually see put us at Petite's Gap, an elevation of 2361 feet.

It wasn't until mile marker 72 that we broke through the second round of cloud riding. The clouds had cleared the road, but still clung stubbornly to the valleys and divides on the peaks to our right. It didn't feel like we'd actually left the heavens until our pit stop for gas at Big Island on Route 501. You could smell the grease from whatever they were frying at the Mountainview Restaurant, so we passed on that establishment for lunch, snacking on our stash of raisins and almonds instead.

We continued back on the Parkway until the end, and then onto Skyline Drive through Shenandoah Valley National Park. Unfortunately, the combination of cloud cover and altitude forced us to stop and suit up with rain gear, in part to keep warm, and to prepare for the rain that threatened.

Luckily the rain held off and we made it to Manassas without incident. It had been the longest ride of the trip - eleven hours - and we were exhausted.  Our energy level piqued as we rode past the entrance to the Manassas National Battlefield on the way to our hotel. It propelled us through dinner, but we were both asleep by 9:00pm.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was an amazing ride, and an experience we won't soon forget.