A wet Bike Ride

I have to laugh at the title of the last post now...  As I was sure I didn't want to ride in the rain...  But we had this trip planned with the Romeos...  For a ride in Northern Arkansas...

Arkansas River from Petit Jean State Park.

South of Harrison, Arkansas there are numerous roads that go up and over the mountains there...  They are extremely curvy and quite steep in places....  That makes for some challenging riding...

We stayed at a resort called the Hub..  It appears to be an old church camp that was re purposed as a motor cycle resort...  It has a circular activities hall and attached restaurant along with a 50 room hotel...

Now this isn't the newest facility and the rooms were in need of a bit of repair....  But we were just sleeping there and gathering in the conference center to do what Romeo's do best...  BS with each other...

The Hub is in a non existent town of Marble Falls, Arkansas, where there are numbers of old shut down buildings....  It must have been an attraction at one time...  And the couple that owns the Hub does what they can to keep the property up, but............   Things weren't the best..  We had holes in the lamp shades and the head boards had been removed from the beds without any replacements..  Just the holes in the wall where they used to be...  But then what do you want for $50 a night....

We rode the cycles down there on Monday the 15th and it was 60% chance of rain...  But we never found the part where it was raining...  It was overcast for most of the morning and we rode thru wet roads where it had just rained but nary a drop on us..

It was 250 miles down there from my house but mostly divided highway..  Fairly straight too...  But that all changed on Tuesday morning... We looked out to fog across the mountains to the South..  And we promptly rode off into that fog...  Curvy hilly fog...  But not rain drops... Just damp cloudy air..

As we topped the mountain, it was sunny on the South side and we descended into Russellville on Interstate 40, where there is a really nice Honda motorcycle dealer....  They custom build trikes and repaint many of the other bikes that are brand new from Japan..  So custom colors are everywhere...



After a while resisting the sales pitch, we headed off to Petit Jean State Park..  This is a mountain top park named after a small lady that stowed away on a ship from europe as a cabin boy...  The park was built by the CCC in the thirties...

The picture above was taken looking Southwest from the mountain over the Arkansas river as it winds towards Little Rock...

What the picture doesn't show is the thunderstorm that over my right shoulder...  And that was exactly where we had to ride to get back to the Hub...

We ended up taking refuge in a McDonalds for... a couple of hours while it poured rain..  And then rode 75 miles in dense fog back up over the mountains, arriving well after dark.  That was a white knuckle ride in the curves, but we weren't soaked yet...

More in the next post, as this is too long now.....  Retired Rod