The first day for Acie and I to ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway was generally wonderful. We went from mile 1 heading south to about mile 200. There was a 24 mile detour through Roanoke due to roadwork on the Parkway. Though we had a nice lunch at a place named Macados, we agree that Roanoke was not a pleasant place to detour through. We believe we hit every single red light in the entire city, it was hot and unpleasant. Not fun at all.

In general the ride was nice through about mile 168. Storm clouds gathered and we prepared for rain. As I fiddled with my new GoPro (giving me lots of problems, more about that in a future post) I accidentally snapped a photo while trying to start a new video with the entirely insufficient battery. Here it is, no work of art, but look at the gathering storm clouds I accidentally caught in the photo. Foreboding, huh?

Sure enough when we remounted our motorcycles the downpour soon started. There are few good choices in that situation as there are few good places to find shelter along the parkway. After about 15 minutes of riding through the deluge we pulled into Marbry Mill, a very nice stop on the Parkway that had a roof to duck under. We applied the well known weather abatement method of getting a cup of ice cream. Sure enough the rain steadily lessened and we rode through the lighter rain to our exit and motel for the night. Here is a Quik GoPro video demonstrating riding through the storm…

It was pretty intense for a while but we were careful and made it through safely. There will be more and gentler video samples coming from the trail, but tomorrow will be a special, unrelated to motorcycles, Throwback Thursday tied to a special day. In the days following, hopefully many more fun ride videos.

As always you can find more at www.walterthinnes.com and on Twitter @walterthinnes