Last weekend, I finally ticked a bucket list item, riding the 120 mile Shenandoah Skyline Drive. I planned a loop, of 325 miles, going the most twisty roads possible (via the app calimoto).

The app did not disappoint. At one point it took me on a single gravel road for a few miles, that had me questioning if I was even on the right road, as it had all the feelings of a private farm road that was about to land me up in some angry farmers yard. The ride up the mountain roads around Wintergreen was outstanding and looking forward to getting back to that area.

Had all the seasons come at me in one day; sunshine, heat, dense fog, thunderstorms and finally torrentially rain (the rain was so hard, it was changing the music tracks on my Android Auto screen).

I entered in the south entrance, and the friendly park ranger noted he didn’t get that many people this side of the ride, and he said you’ve pretty much got the place to yourself. He was right, I seen only a handful of cars for the first 30 miles. Once I got over the halfway mark, it got a little more traffic, clearly people entering from Washington side, and then doing a loop.

Ironically there wasn’t much to see, due to the dense fog. All the viewing stations was just looking at a wall of grey. Eventually the sun burned through the clouds and the place opened up. Outstanding.

Experimenting with my GoPro (as I prepare for Morocco in September) as well as trying my new Sena Specter helmet on a longer run. Both performed very well, with the helmets in-built speakers being the best I have had. Even with my ear plugs, coupled with its noise-cancellation, I did not need to turn the volume to the highest, I could enjoy the spoken word via a podcast for the first time (historically it’s been too noisy to attempt such a feat).

More local twisty trips planned, as well as my upping my video editing skills (Telemetry Overlay is an excellent piece of software for pulling out the GoPro details to put on top of the final video).