May 12
This was a day of motoring. We had to make it all the way across the state in order to set ourselves up for our full day of smoky mountain riding tomorrow!
We had last minute plans to go to the BMW plant in Spartanburg SC – one of our group mentioned it at the beginning of the trip, and sounded really cool: they make cars, not motorcycles, but the building is also a super-efficient green building which I love. So we headed out across the state on small roads, with the plans to avoid highways as much as possible but make up time in some key areas. We got about 2/3 of the way to Spartanburg and were frantically trying to make up miles on the highway when the interested party said “oh hey, let’s screw it. I’ll do it another time. it’s too far away.” We all agreed that it was turning out to be too much work for vacation and happily, we hadn’t gotten too far out of the way, so we hung a left and went south towards our destination for the night.
It was hot going. We stopped to try some boiled peanuts – they are AMAZING with a can of coke.
The last leg of the trip was just twisty and pretty enough (after our long hot ride through some of SCs big highways) to perk everyone up. And I did have a surprise for everyone – we were overnighting in Helen GA , which is a bavarian-style town in the mountains of N Ga. I didn’t tell anyone about the architecture so when we pulled in and saw this:
It got even better walking to dinner:
Everyone was really surprised! it was super. I was a little worried Helen would be kitchy, or that we wouldn’t have enough time to enjoy it, but it was even cuter and more interesting than I had hoped, and everyone loved it and we all are secretly planning to go back another time for a longer stay.
We had an amazing meal at the (of course!) Hofbrauhaus.
And afterwards, we walked back to the hotel and turned in for another early start and a long day of twisties!
[[check out the summary post with lessons learned, and a full index to this ride report post.]]
