Day 1

We arrived at Afton, VA this morning, the starting point of the Blue Ridge Parkway, after spending the night in Lynchburg, VA. I was able to change clothes and put my bike together at the National Park station, this is where the Skyline Drive ends. That’s a similar 150 mile parkway running through the Virginia mountains. It tends to be flatter.

Robbie and I took some pictures at mile zero and I took off. Within a mile of the start I began a significant climb, 6 to 8% gradient. Based on today’s experience this is going to be the average. I actually did a couple of climbs today where I hit 12%. That’s how much your bike is tilted upward when going uphill. The average ride in the Charlotte, NC area is 3 to 5% at best, when going uphill.

The real story today was not the hilly terrain; I was prepared for that, but the weather. Because of hurricane Irene we had a lot of wind. I got started at 11 am, and as the next hour unfolded the wind picked up, correlating with the hurricane moving inland in North Carolina and Virginia. I'm back at the hotel now, and have seen the outer band of the hurricane striking the area we are in. We had wind gusts of over 30 miles an hour and light rain most of the 50 miles I rode. The wind moved my front wheel around a lot, and required me to pedal thru some tough headwinds; however most of the wind came from the sides. The gusts of wind resulted in numerous leaves and branches on the surface of the road.

I had little opportunity to ride in flat sections today; most of the ride was either uphill at 6 mph, or downhill at 30 mph. The descents were even scarier today because of the wet roads. Of course, I don’t care much for high speed descents anyhow; I'm typically grabbing my brakes at 30 mph. I think I may of hit 34 today. I did a pretty good job climbing, with a total of 5,060 feet of ascent. For the 50 miles, that works out to about 100 feet per mile, triple what we see on our Charlotte rides.

Today I had beautiful scenery, thick clouds at times, fast downhill’s, wet roads, 73 degree temperatures, 100% humidity, 10% gradients, high winds from every direction, road debris, low traffic, a great wife who supported me with lunch on the road, a lot of fun.

Tomorrow will be interesting. We’re spending the night at a Red Carpet Inn in Lexington, VA, 10 miles off the Parkway, we’ll leave here by car, return to mile 50, I’ll begin a 10 mile descent, then climb from Bluff Mountain Tunnel at 630 feet of elevation (the lowest on the Parkway) to the top of Apple Orchard Mountain, at 3,950 feet, the highest point on the Virginia side of the Parkway. That’ll be over 3,000 feet of climbing in 10 miles, or 300 feet per mile, an insane amount. Looks like a lot of my work will be done for the day after that climb; I’ll finish with 70 miles in Roanoke tomorrow. Hope to find a better hotel there, we ran into a horse show crowd tonight, and believe it or not, a large number of people moving inland to escape the hurricane, so we had to stay at this place, not really the Hilton, but I'm proud to have a bed to sleep in.
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