On Sunday November 3, 2008, Mr. Boone and I set out to ride from Boone to Asheville via the Blue Ridge Parkway. Originally, this idea was mine and it was hatched as a way to close out the season with a bang! Originally the idea was to leave Magic Cycles and ride 100 miles to Asheville. Well, lets just say that my brain finally realized that this was crazy, as did Mr. Boone's, so we decided to leave from the Beacon Heights Ovelook and ride to A-ville. This cut the ride to 75 miles and eliminated a big climb up to Grandfather Mtn.
We started the ride at 9:30 am and hoped to be in A-ville by about 2 or 3pm. All went well and we covered the first 15 miles in about an hour. The weather was fantastic, the leaves were still on the trees and it was about 60F at the start. I got a call at the one hour mark from Maureen, who was still not sure if she was going to drive to A-ville to pick me up. She just wanted to check on me and I told her I was feeling fine, but check on me in another 30 miles.
Well, my words could not have been more prophetic. We passed the Little Switzerland resort after another hour and that's when the wheels started to wobble. I felt cramps starting in my legs, but didn't think too much of it. Well from Little Switzerland it was another twelve miles and I had completely imploded! Those 12 miles were really slow and seemed to go on forever. There were long climbs and I just wasn't making progress. That and the cramps really started to lock up my legs.
It all got to me and mentally I collapsed. I tried calling Maureen at an overlook. I told Mr. Boone that I was going to ride the 12 miles back to Little Switzerland and wait for my ride. I got a hold of Maureen and it went something like this:
Me: "Hey honey, are you on your way?"
Mo: "No, the baby just went to sleep. Are you okay?"
Me: "Not really, could you pick me up?"
Mo: "Are you bleeding, are you throwing up?"
Me: "No."
Mo: "Well then, ride you fucking bike. C'mon Klinedinst."
And that was pretty much it. I had no choice to ride. My wife shamed me into finishing the freaking ride. Thank heavens for the swift kick in the ass she gave. That and thanks to the nice husband and wife team we met en route. They filled my water bottles for me and the wife gave me a ride to the top of the final climb up Mt. Mitchell.
That's right I had to hitch a ride up the parkway climb to Mt. Mitchell. The climb came right after the call home. I pushed on for a couple of miles, but when I started the climb, my legs went into full lock out. I hitched a ride up the 3mile climb and I'm glad I did, but I hope when I do this ride again I won't have to.
From this point the BRP was closed to motorized traffic. We rode from the entrance to Mt. Mitchell state park all the way to A-ville on a car-less parkway! Sweet! There was snow on the BRP between Mt. Mitchell and Craggy Gardens. This is the highest section of the BRP that we were riding. There were remnants of the previous week's snow storm on the north facing and shady portions of the road. Mr. Boone took pleasure in pelting me with snowballs.
Thankfully, my cramps subsided and I made it to Craggy Gardens a bit frayed, but in one piece. From Craggy to A-ville is basically downhill. Sweet, flowing, car-less downhill for about 15 miles. Actually it kind of sucked at first because it was so damn cold. After that we started to see more leaves on the trees and the temperature warmed and we realized that we had made it.
The ride was 75 miles (72 for me) with 7000ft of climbing. Perfect.
