April 18, 2011 - Miranda and I left Columbus this morning headed to Jacksonville Beach. It's Miranda's first long distance motorcycle trip. We actually got on the road at 10:30 this morning. Ohio went by pretty quickly and we crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky near Ashland. The Ohio River was ANGRY today. It was really high and moving fast. The ride through the Bluegrass state was pretty uneventful. We rode US-23 "The Country Music Highway" all of the way through the state. After Kentucky we were briefly in Virginia. It ended up being about 6:00PM when we
made it to Tennessee. Miranda and I had a decision to make. We could either call it a day and not quite get to our intended mileage goal (the 10:30am start time was about two hours later than I wanted) or we could hop on Interstate 26 and fast track our way to Asheville, NC. Asheville had been my intended goal. We decided to go ahead and ride the Interstate and I am glad that we did.
Even though I-26 is and Interstate Highway it didn't go through any major metropolitan areas. We still got a really good view of the mountains in TN and NC.
Tomorrow we'll h
ave to adjust our route a little bit but I'm hoping to get an earlier start. We'll see what happens. As I write this I'm really exhausted and ready for bed.
On a personal note, Miranda was an absolute trooper. Not one complaint all day and she's an awesome travelling companion. The only thing that would make the trip better would be Laela on a scooter with Indy in a side car to go with us.
States that we visited today:
