Got home about 7:30pm Central. Hit a little rain (in the truck) heading out of Robbinsville but it cleared up as I moved South.

Will post more later...got to get inside and see the wifey.

Probably the best riding weekend I have had at the Dragon! Great riding with great friends!

Dave should be getting home in an hour or two...

A man must know his limits.  

I got home about 9:30 last light.  The drive home was pretty tough for the first few hours - I got stung by a wasp on my right hand early in the morning, and my hand was pretty swollen.  As Stew and I were packing up one of the ladies as the Kickstand Lodge gave me some of her Walmart brand "Benadryl" to help with the swelling.  As I was driving up the Dragon I started to get that "drugged up" sleepy feeling, and it lasted for about 3 hours....I was fighting to stay awake!  Traffic was pretty good - just a few crazy folks on the highway to keep it interesting. I hit a big swarm of bugs in Lexington KY that had guts that left white splatters....with a clear goo that would continue to ooze and make long streaks on the window.  You just had to peer around the bugs and I saw the big smeary mess that happens on other folks windows when they tried to use their wipers - so I just continued to peer around the bugs.  I left the car outside last night and the dew on the windshield had softened the bug guts enough to allow the wipers to remove them.

As Oldfeller reported - we found some really nice roads on this trip and went looking for the tight/twisty roads that favor turning ability over top speed.  On Saturday I believe I never used more than 1/3rd throttle most of the day....and on 1 tank of fuel I got 62mpg (pure 93 octane gas bought at Deals Gap).  It would have been handy to have a "curve counter" - I would imagine that we rounded several thousand curves on that day.

I bought a GoPro a couple weeks ago and I recorded video - as soon as I figure out how to get it out of the camera I will post video of Stewmills and MM riding on the Dragon and on Moonshiner 28.  The sound is a bit weird for some reason - when accelerating the engine sound is fine - but when decelerating or at steady speeds the sound is like somebody walking on dry leaves or is crunching their morning cereal.

I turned 10,000 miles on my bike on this trip, and it did just fine on the trip - it gave me a bit of a scare as the headplug leaked badly from the campground to Huddle House on Thursday morning.  It was leaking badly enough that I thought maybe I would have to bail out and take the bike home.  When we rode out on the Cherohala to meet MM it didn't appear to leak anymore - and after washing the oil off that evening I didn't see any additional leaks all weekend.  I put this engine together before Versy had his headplug available - so it has the stock headplug.

On Saturday we rode up to Deals Gap and made a quick run up/down the Dragon before the crowds arrived, and then we met MM's brother Kent for breakfast at the Deals Gap restaurant.  We rode south on 28 and we saw a whole bunch of new and vintage Chrysler products headed toward the Dragon - it was good that we got our "Dragon Fix" done early!  We continued riding south on 28, then in GA we headed to ride west on Warwoman to Clayton.  At that point Kent left us to go home, and we spent the rest of the afternoon dodging rain.  We would ride to a clear spot in the sky - but by the time we got to the clear spot the dark clouds had moved in.  We ended up riding west and went through Helen, GA, and found some great roads to ride on around the Two Wheels of Suches.  We should go spend a day or two in that area exploring those roads - one road called Wolf Pen Gap is 11 miles of really tight/steep curves - the curves are much tighter than the ones on the Dragon!  Unfortunately a big rain storm had rolled through the are just before we got there - and we had to ride for about 30 miles on very wet roads.

It was an enjoyable trip for me - it was mostly dry and Oldfeller and MM only found a small amount of gravel roads to drag me on.  Stewmills is a great "apprentice" and is quickly becoming a skilled rider and he has learned how to drag a peg now and then!  

I only took one still photo on the trip......the 2 Harleys and 2 Suzukis that were tearing up the twisties on Saturday.

Stew ,
OldFeller. .   Trained C. Ruined both of us ... An old timer named Big Zuke , was in on "seeing to it that I learned to woop-those Dragons properly by setting up the corners correctly."

My CMAUSA buddys  won't keep up the way my Savage Friends will , they don't know how and I can't get them out enough to get em trained !  😕

My home internet is out for two days and counting  !

Thank goodness for Chickfila.

I am not selling my Savage either -- I like it too much.

But having looked into the Guzzi a bit it is intriguing to be that light, that it is understressed and that easy to live with and to still have the cornering clearance that it does.   Expensive, though.  900cc is still plenty powerful enough too.

And  your Guzzi points about pushrods, zero valve clearance hydraulic no maintenance valves. and not having to haul around two gallons of radiator anti-freeze are all to the good.

And no, I wasn't going to the places that would kill me on that frame dragging Barcalounger.    Yep, Dragon bad, very bad.

And also, on day two (day 3 for me) you could have whupped up on me with a wet noodle, much less using an 888 Sportster.   I was hurting.  

Stewmills whupped up on me in the tight stuff, 'nuff said -- you'd have slayed me.

Maybe I have finally figured out how to post a YouTube video  I still can't use the GoPro app, for some reason it won't send the video to YouTube the way it is supposed to.  In desperation I just pulled the storage card out of the camera and copied the video on the computer.  This is not the Dragon Video.....it is MMRanch on his 883 Sportster on the way up 28 to ride the Dragon - you can see the edge of my headlight in the bottom right corner of the video....I am riding my Savage Cafe' bike.

This short little video took 25 minutes to download to YouTube!

https://youtu.be/fMYfVnvh7XQ

The video does make it look slower than it feels - and you lose the 3 dimensional aspect, as hills that are really steep just don't show up and the roads all look flat.  The video above is a pretty steep uphill section until just before the end where we crest the hill.

We do scoot along at a pretty good clip and often catch up to slower riders - I can't remember a single motorcycle passing us all weekend on the 2 lane roads....I do remember one lone biker that passed us when we were on the 4 lane section of 28 as he was exceeding the posted speed limit.  There are some sport bike and Supermoto riders that can easily outrun us and appear to ride twice our speed - we just didn't find any of them on this trip.

I am loading an 8 minute video from the Tail of the Dragon - it appears it will take about 3.5 hours to load the video to YouTube!

Stewmills and MMRanch on the Dragon.  This was on a Saturday morning before things got too busy - there were a few rolling roadblocks that were nice enough to let us pass once they got to a place to pull over.

https://youtu.be/Eu-2kNjUHsE