Girl Meets World on Yamaha FZ-07: Chapter 2, Part 23

This whole winter thing is starting to get rough on a motorcycle! (Even my beloved Yamaha FZ-07 !) I didn't make too much progress this time around, but we're almost there, so time for another good old fashioned play by play! We headed out of Gainseville, GA midday and made our way up toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we stopped to figure out where we even wanted to go in Kentucky. I got pretty excited when I realized Kentucky actually had a National park (this is shockingly rare in the southeast), so we set our sights for Mammoth Caves National Park.

The park was basically entirely underground, as the caves consisted of over 400 miles of passages. We stopped by the visitor center to inquire about camping and exploring the caves. While camping was no problem, it turns out that they don’t allow any self-guided tours, and the paid tours were all sold out. Lame. Things like reservations and schedules don’t lend themselves well to my haphazard and spontaneous route choosing, it seems. It would have felt like a totally wasted trip, but we made our way to the other end of the park and camped outside the ferry landing along the Green River. It rained much of the night, but the temperatures were mild, and it felt good to sleep outside again. While part of the reason I camp is to save money so I can stay on this trip as long as possible, it’s also because I genuinely love being outside, and I feel like you see so much more of the country and meet so many more people sleeping among the trees and lakes and rivers. As a friend once told me, as long as you have a tent, food, fuel, and water, you’re never lost, because wherever you are is home.

But, as nice as it was to camp again, everything was drenched, and it was a long wet, cold, and windy ride west. We made it as far as Paducah, where we decided we’d stop to celebrate Thanksgiving (yes, we're a little behind on posting these updates) in another inexpensive hotel while our gear dried out. We found a nearby restaurant to get something vaguely resembling Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a little sad to be on the road during the holidays, sometimes. Travelling breaks just about every routine you’ve ever had, but sometimes, I miss the routines of holiday traditions, like cooking dinner with my mom and baking pies from scratch. Probably sounds silly to complain about much of anything when I get to ride a motorcycle every day with my best friend, but sometimes it’s the little things.

As we relaxed looking out on the city from the hotel walkway, we watched as droves of people lined up for Black Friday specials at the nearby stores, watching what used to be a normal part of my life now like an outside observer. Our culture seems stranger and stranger the more time I spend outside my norm, haha. We should have just pitched our tent outside the Best Buy and used that as free camping for the night!

The next morning, we were back on the road heading west again. We skirted through the bottom of Illinois, crossing over where the Ohio River met the Mississippi then crossed into Missouri. While I’ve seen a lot of rivers now, riding bridges over these massive bodies of water as they came together was nothing short of awe inspiring. We got as far as Doniphan before veering off onto the 160, a twisty road toward a lake where we had planned to camp. Fall was passed now, and winter had turned the remaining leaves muted browns. We turned off onto a dirt road that was supposed to lead to Fourche Lake, but the road quickly became drastically uneven, and the heavy leaf cover made it difficult to discern where the road even was, so we stopped before things got too rough. Fallen trees blocked the path to the lake, and no matter how much I try to force the FZ-07 to be a dirt bike, it definitely didn’t have the suspension to jump logs.

We parked in a clearing big enough to pitch our tent, and hung out for the night. Another night of gunshots ringing out in the distance. Not that surprising given the slew of rundown Deliverance-esque trailers on the road in, though. Realistically, the sound of gunshots is probably less scary than hearing the sound of banjos in some of the spots we’ve been recently.

The next morning, we woke up damp and freezing. The road into the next town seemed like it should have been incredibly fun, but the brutality of the cold and my freezing numb hands made it hard to enjoy what was otherwise a great layout of turns. We stopped in the nearby town of Alton, as I couldn’t bear to keep going, and got breakfast at the gas station- literally the only “restaurant” in town. People smoked inside the gas station, and an old motocross racer and a local rider stopped to talk to us, excited to see motorbikes parked in the lot at a time of year when no one was still riding around there. Unfortunately, I could barely understand some of their accents, so holding a conversation was more than a bit of a challenge. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live in a southern state. Missouri is a strange place.

We got back on the road after a just barely passable breakfast and made it another handful of miles to West Plains, where we called it quits amidst the heavy fog, threats of snow, and painfully low temperatures. It just didn’t feel worth it to keep going that day, and the road was too much fun to spoil with bad weather. Hollywood had been struggling all morning with his bike handling strangely as it was, so it made sense to stop and try to figure out if it was more than just the cold weather preventing good grip. The tire didn’t appear to be flat, but the symptoms sounded like a flat tire, so I dug out my gauge. 6.5 pounds of pressure. Damn, those are some stiff sidewalls on those Shinkos, because it appeared almost normal! Whoops!

We made our way another mile or two down the road to a nearby dealer where they filled us up. We couldn’t find any obvious hole or leak, so we opted to monitor it until we swapped out a new tire, which we were doing soon anyway. We made our way to the cheapest motel in town, and waited out the fog. Fortunately, a restaurant next to the hotel offered inexpensive steak (and, much more importantly, free ice cream with a fresh baked cookie), so I’m still going to call this day a fine success. I think sometimes the weather is looking out for us, because we wouldn’t have stopped to check the tire (or gotten aforementioned free ice cream) if it hadn’t suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Thanks nature! That said, just 2 states to go! Almost there!