The Beautiful Blue Ridge

Day 24 – July 3, 2009
Tonight will be our last night on the road – last time to unpack and repack all this stuff. We have got it down to about 20 minutes in the morning to load the bikes. But I’m thinking it might be a good idea to shop for a small trailer. The plan was to leave the Interstate and head for Charlottesville then Fredericksburg, VA for the night and then tomorrow morning we will head north on 301; only 150 miles from Fredericksburg to home. The traffic on the bridge should not be bad on the 4th of July. All day we were traveling in the Blue Ridge Mountain range with the gentle foothills and mountain stacked on mountain all covered with fertile soil. The Rocky Mountains are majestic with their high, sheer rock spikes towering above everything in sight but the Blue Ridge appears soft, relaxing and inviting dressed in deep green. Homes or farms are scattered about and the slopes are strip farmed; a strip of corn, a strip of wheat, and another strip of corn or tobacco so everything is not harvested at the same time to avoid erosion of the soil. We stopped for lunch in Gordonsville and decided to purchase a large hanging basket of flowers from the shop across the street and place them on Don’s grandmother’s grave. The graveyard is only about 4 miles down the road so he unloaded the ice chest from the back seat of the trike and I climbed on holding this huge basket of flowers off to the right in the palm of my hand like a pie (it was too large to fit between us) and supporting it with the other hand. One lady and man in the parking lot were laughing and said they wished they had a camera because we certainly made quite a sight. They even offered to take the flowers to the grave for us but it just doesn’t mean as much unless you place them yourself. Traffic around Fredericksburg is awful! I have been coming to this area for over 40 years and remember when it was a small town and didn’t even have a shopping center; now there are several malls and multi-lane roads leading people where they want to go.