Southern States Tour – Day 45

Again, the weather was very nice and much better than expected. High temperatures reached the low 80’s and the skies were partly cloudy to mostly cloudy later in the day.

Day’s distance: 199 miles
Total trip distance: 8,197 miles

I didn’t have far to travel today, so I did some laundry in the morning while still at the Fontana Village Resort. Finished with that, I departed the lodge about 11am, headed for Robbinsville and the Cherohala Skyway.

The Fontana Village is quite extensive and includes a marina at Fontana Lake. It seemed quite a scenic area and the resort was full of amenities, including a frisbee golf course. Frisbee golf takes me back to my graduate school days. 😉

Today’s goal was to ride the Cherohala Skyway, starting in North Carolina and finishing in Tennessee.

The two-lane road was in very good shape, with a speed limit of 45mph in most places. The twists and turns of Cherohala weren’t as concentrated as on the Tail of the Dragon, but the speed limit was higher and the scenery was more expansive as the Skyway runs partly on top of the local mountain ridges.

As the Skyway approaches Tellico Plains, it follows a river and reminded me of Hwy 12 in Idaho.

I stopped at the Tellico Kat’s Deli for a sandwich and some coffee. I sat out back on the porch that overlooks the river, enjoying the tranquility and winding down after traveling the Skyway.

Most of the rest of the day was spent traveling from Tellico Plains to Marietta where I stayed the night. The motel was about 3 miles north of the dealer that was going to perform my 30,000 miles service the next morning. The roads I took were a mixture of smaller highways congested with local traffic to some interstates which were less interesting but moved quickly. I guess sometimes you take the good with the bad.

Until tomorrow !!