US Bike Trip 2007

Somewhere in Pennsylvania.

From the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The Natural Bridge tourist trap.

Grandfather Mountain swing bridge in North Carolina.

The highest elevation on the Blue Ridge. From here it was all downhill, luckily....

Great Smokey National Park.

The Children's Holocaust Memorial at Whitwell Middle School, Tennessee. 

The authenic era suitcase full of apologies to Anne Frank sent from a German school.

Point Pelee National Park, the southern most tip of Canada.

July 6-12, 2007
Terri and I undertook another long drive from Toronto through the States of New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and back into Canada through Detroit. On the way home we visit Point Pelee National Park (the most southernly piece of Canada), Port Dover to see the annual motorcyle assembly that occurs every Friday the 13th, and Paris to visit friends.

The main purpose of the ride was to travel the Shenandoah Parkway, just west of Washington, through the National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway that traverses the summit ridge of the Appalachian Moutains for 469 miles from Charlottesville, Virginia, all the way to the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. These two highways offer stunning visas from the top of the mountains out over the valleys on the west or the east side, or sometimes in both directions. The road is through a national park system and allows no commercial truck traffic, has no stops signs or traffic lights, or billboards, gas stations, wires or poles for the whole length. Fuel stations, towns and restaurants had to be accessed by leaving the parkway and driving down to the valley. We saw numerous deer along the road and lots of birds as well.

En route we stopped at Grandfather's Mountain where we had a great hike across a swing bridge and over to the summit. It offered great views over the moutains.

It was raining and damp when we reached the high point of the parkway at an elevation of 6053ft (1845m). Stopped for a photo and saw a man trying to do up his convertible sports car before it turned into a bathtub. I told Terri that the good news was we had reached the summit but the bad news was we had no gas and were well into reserve! So I decided to coast down the road to the nearest gas station. After we got started I turned off the bike and we rolled downhill making engines noises at speeds up to 60km for almost 10 kilometres to the town of Asheville, North Carolina.

From there we road to Gaitlinburg, an incredibly touristy town and the entrance to the Great Smoky National Park. We enjoyed the scenic drive and the views in the park before continuing on through Nashville and Chatanooga to Whitwell, Tennessee.

This is the home of the Children's Holocaust Memorial that I had read about and of which the movie Paperclips was made. Basically it is the story of how the children and teachers a middle school undertook an incredible project that was started by one student asking "What does six million look like?" The reference was to the millions murdered by the Nazis. They decided to collect one paperclip (a symbol worn by Norwegians to represent missing neighbours during the occupation) to represent each murdered person.  Eventually their project spread world wide and they wound up with millions more paperclips than their goal and they decided to make a memorial. With the help of two German reporters they located and shipped an authentic railway car used for the transports to Auschwitz during the war. The car is now located on the lawn of the school and houses some of the paperclips and other memoribilia that was sent to them. One piece is an authentic suitcase full of letters written by German students apologizing to Anne Frank and the other Jews for the way they were treated.

We arrived in the summer when the school was closed but we found the memorial open with a sign that read please come in. It was a very moving experience and an amazing memorial in basically the middle of nowhere.

When we left we rode north back through Kentucy, Ohio and Michigan along some freeways and secondary roads through farmland. When we crossed back into Canada we rode to Point Pelee National Park, which sits on a pennisula into Lake Erie. We walked along the beaches and through the marshes before settling in Lemington for the night. From there we rode onto Port Dover... the next post.