Bike Odyssey 2014 – May 21 – Day 5: The Great Southern Egg Disappearance

Our first 1000 miles completed yesterday! – exactly on time, in 5 days, leaving us two days – according to our plan – to recuperate, rest up, or investigate local attractions. Leaving Roanoke and the Knights Inn behind, we climbed back up to the Blue Ridge. Everything about the day was devilishly perfect: the best motorbiking day either of us can recall (and for Joe this includes 7 great trips, among them London to Beijing), on Blue Ridge parkway roads that made me ashamed of my earlier complaints. I’d begun to think of it as the Desolation Parkway, but south of Roanoke the sweeping panoramas are accompanied by farms and tiny villages and houses dotted here and there – signs of mountain living. The roads could have been devised for bikes, with their drunken swooping curves; the views are comparable, for majesty, only to the Rif and the Eastern Cape, of those I’ve seen – I’m sure many readers could trump them, but they’re my top two. I exempt the hills around Siena, the masterpiece of domesticated landscape; the Blue Ridge views are untamed forest, as the Parkway progresses southwards on its 450-mile journey. Only the gigantic, extinct American chestnut, once king of the American East, is sadly missing. (Attempts are being made to create a disease-proof strain, in the Far East, whence – ironically enough – the fatal disease came.)

The day began oddly with a fruitless search for fried eggs. Diner after restaurant after diner came up eggless, even when eggs were pronounced eggs, iggs or (correctly) aye-iggs. One restaurant owner, after long reflection, replied, “You mean… to eat?”. I said I was prepared – if she could face the mess – to juggle them, but eating eggs was what I’d had in mind. Finally we found a place which, after offering us an egg ONLY if served on top of a burger, surrendered to negotiations with the chef, via several intermediaries, and produced eggs – to eat. The South is, of course, another country. “Where y’all from?” asked our Waffle House waitress tonight, in Asheville. “Britain,” volunteered 4 times by me, produced only a query of “Brooklyn?”, and “England,” helpfully added by Joe, was met with utter bafflement.

The Waffle House – a franchise resisted only, so far, by South Florida, no one knows why – does of course have aye-iggs aplenty, thank the Lord. Joe has been trying out burgers, the American national dish. As I write this, thunder and lightning reign outside, weather that drove us back from our intended trip on the Smoky Mountains’ Cherohala Skyway today, and into another Super 8 motel, in Asheville, a city now deformed by the usual franchise-blight and appalling peripheral traffic. How lovely and peaceful it was, last night, when we pulled in at 8:00 pm to our lonely campsite (no one on duty there – which saved us $16), put up our respective tent, and cooked up a fine if bizarre supper of pasta and a can of chili sauce. By the time we’d finished it was 10:00 pm so we hit the hay, little expecting the tumultuous downpour that followed – a good test for our tents, which passed in style. We slept well, and stayed dry, and swept on down the Parkway this morning when we’d assembled our rain-battered gear. Packing up is long and slow when camping by motorbike, but gives a certain nomadic satisfaction. In Asheville I paid a discreet visit to the site of the old hospital where poor mad Zelda Fitzgerald was burned to death, one of the city’s sadder claims to fame.