Yep, I am back home again.
Dave's road and ride synopsis is spot on, there are no amazing Savage roads in the Georgia mountains. We like to ride at 25-60 mph on a very curvy Savage road and the good Savage roads suit those speeds.
Dave theorizes that the guy who marked up the map for him rides GSXer type machines and he goes very very fast on those Georgia rural roads to make them exciting. This could be, we saw no Georgia cops down there writing tickets. We did see a lot of fairly finished looking mountain communities, with very well developed lakes, kinda like the Lake Lure area in NC.
Most of the roads were 3 lane construction, with a passing lane alternating in each direction every 3 miles or so so getting around a slow poke wasn't much of an adventure to us.
There were no great yet cheap cabins in the Franklin/Georgia area either. There is some cheap stuff, but the cheap stuff is very run down
OLD stuff and the good to great stuff is very expensive, much more so than Blue Ridge Motorcycle campground.
I felt comfortable calling the trip a bust as far as finding any new places to stay within the first 9 hours of riding around.
I characterize the "places to stay" issue like this ---
the 1960's and 1970's people who actually built these campgrounds and the cabins and who actually put it all together are mostly dying from old age now. Only the very rare places like Blue Ridge Motorcycle Campground are really good enough to have been profitable ongoing (and to be sold and and bought again by new blood) in this day and age.
The very very run down very old cabins I stayed in were built 30+ years ago out of rough sawn 2" thick 14" wide pine planks installed vertically that had exterior 4" wide 1" thick strips from the same material nailed over the fit up gaps on the outside. "Lap and strake construction" is what it was called when I was a kid, and all the corn cribs and farm barns and outbuildings used it. This cabin construction method had very much in common with those farm buildings, especially the tin roofs and the door construction methods (exact same heavy 2 by 14 construction as found in a barn door).
BTW,
Waylah Road is a real gem of a ride, worth searching out all by itself. It by itself has all the road styles we love so much, multiple mountain up-downs, a stream run and a lakeside run. It has shaded mountain close twisty woods runs, a national park kayak laden stream run and farmland runs all on the same lengthy road.
A primo day loop would be stay in Robbinsville, go up to the Dragon on 128 and come back down 28 (alias Fontana Dam Road) going all the way down to Franklin, then picking up Waylah road to ride back to Robbinsville. If we were touring a group of newbies, this would be a good second or third day run after we broke them in good riding the Cherohala Skyway's big sweepers.
We could wait until we had enough people (6-7) to fill up the BIG DOG at Simple Life Campground to get the BETTER QUALITY OF STAY at a relatively more reasonable price tag (perhaps skipping a year if need be to increase the participation rate).
Robbinsville is a near optimal location to stay at, really.My post surgical body report (my other reason for going). Yes, I can still ride a bike up to the mountains and back again on the same weekend --- but I have to pay too much in leg based body pain in the doing of it. But I can still do it. But only for only a day or so, so please understand there will be no more long iron butt weekends for this old boy.
Bike on a trailer, that's me ......
Compliments to Dave, he rode all the Georgia areas once before I got there and he rode them again after I left.
Nothing got skipped over, so Dave has a complete and honest appraisal of all the northern Georgia roads as recommended to us by his friend.
To me, the north Georgia roads are sub-par compared to what we normally ride up in NC proper.
The condition of the road surface is poor, with tar snakes everywhere as they are in the slow process of being repaved. Dave's Kawa 250 hates them tar snakes, you can see him abruptly move over a few inches every time he hits a fresh tar snake while taking a sharp turn. The Savage isn't nearly as tar snake sensitive, but I got tired of hitting them snakes all the time too.
All in all, a good short trip. Got good info for trip planning out of it, which is why we went in the first place.