Bike Odyssey 2014 – May 21 2014 – at last the real America

Yesterday began with the glorious trees of the Skyline and the Blue Ridge Parkway – every last little lonesome pine on the roadside a separate explosion of warm resin in the sensorium – biking bliss. At the same time this is wilderness for pussies: look to your right, folks… civilisation – see down there? – farmland and towns; and to your left – see down there? farmland and towns. The Blue Ridge is just that: a ridge. Never out of sight of man and his works. A vision of the future when the last strips of forest are on exhibit between strips of highway. Then the future arrived a little more quickly for us. Be a wary tourist in America: Bill Bryson’s book on the Appalachian Trail warned a few years ago about the struggling National Parks Service, ignored and underfunded. The official internet site now offers fictional facilities – visitor centers, restaurants, campsites that no longer exist, locked off and as forbidding as a set of mite-and-pesticide-rotted beehives. We were suddenly threatened by violent rainstorms which also turned out to be another internet fantasy (alarmist, this time, rather than over-optimistic – not a raindrop fell), and came down off the Blue Ridge Mountains by a precipitous road into civi-lahhh-zayshun.
Manager Mr Patel (relatives all over the world – the great Patel tribe) and his assistant Jackie welcomed me to their Super 8 in Roanoke, VA. Meanwhile Joe holed up in the last room at the Knights inn – a franchise beloved of my daughter Chiara, since it was in a Knights Inn outside Kingston where we rocked up many years ago (oh the thrill of a motel to a child) when a tempest-torn tree fell on our roof and there was a danger of more of the same. The Knights Inn, run by Susie and her son Micky, both super-friendly, deserves its own photo and I’ll try to remember to get one; from its sweet delapidation Roanoke runs the gamut to a hi-rise downtown, where we wasted time in vain pursuit of Mr Patel’s recommended Indian restaurant, only to fall back at last on a Famous Anthony where Michael, our 17-year-old server, responded to my request for a much-needed beer, with his own request: “ID, please.” Cute, I thought. Not at all. He meant it. Famous Anthony restaurants have one legitimate claim (and one only) to fame: they card EVERYONE. Last night and this morning were spent being driven from phone number to phone number, from ranger to superintendent’s office to ranger and back, in search of an open campground (people come to draaahve the road, it was pointed out to me), while trying to juggle couchsurfing hosts down the line in Alabama and Mississippi, as weather and the great American road trip play havoc with precise plans. Watch this space.