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WOW! What an experience! Airgate invited me to travel down to Tennessee to check out The Dragon, meet up with some other S2K owners, and do some pre-lim work towards further planning the September Dragonball Run. Stingy image-limit will require me to post a reply momentarily to add more pics from the weekend...
Stayed in New Bern Thursday evening. Airgate treated me to an advanced screening of some of the roads he'll be taking folks on for this weekend's SunCom sponsored auto show down there. Had dinner at his wife Anna's restaurant (Mmmm!). And although the 9 hour drive from New Bern to Knoxville was a mixed bag of rain (sometimes blasted KrAzY rain!...but I luv'd my Kumho's), the drive was fun nonetheless. Stopped by an amazing Foreign Car dealership (Ferrari's, Masserati's, Porshe's, etc.). Exhausted drive back to Richmond was mixed with rain too. But once again, where the weather broke....you can rest assured airgate & I took advantage of the highways!
But back to the topic at hand: The Dragon! Folks...if you've never made this trip, you just don't know what you're missing. If you enjoy ultra-sweet newly paved and perfectly compounded/banked turns, then nothing beats 11 miles and 318 of 'em! And if you're interested, definitely sign up for the September '02 meet!
The nuts & bolts of the stay down was this: Nice motel (not where we'll stay in September...but nice). Good eats (always!). Wet Saturday (hey, tops managed to be down of course), but VERY managable for my first run on the Dragon -- a testiment to the great effort the TN Department of Roads did to that road...widened slightly further & added crush-n-run along the sides even further. Ultimately, 7 of us met up & ran it a number of times up & down. Ran some other roads Saturday as well...but nothing topped The Dragon. Everyone scooted down to a Honda Dealership and kept folks gawking at our S2Ks (then again, we did a lil' gawking of our own too in their showroom!). Sunday morning airgate & I met up in anticipation to run The Dragon a couple more times before we headed to respective homes. Awoke to rain...but drove out anyway. Arrived on The Dragon to mist, but nothing terrible...still top-downable again. Ran it twice & were ready to split b/c it was coming up on 12:30 & we'd said we were going to head home by noon. Well...damn if the sun didn't show up! Another more hour on The Dragon...& this time, we'd installed my palmcorder to his car facing back to mine to capture all the glory of The Dragon! Almost 20 minutes of the most beautiful footage I've seen while drivin' that machine! Can't wait 'til September!
Although my camera batteries died by Sunday (so no pics in the sunshine) here's some pics of the weekend. Enjoy:
BTW, not braggin' cuz I know others have topped it in their sleep perhaps...but just before I picked up 85N from 40E heading towards Richmond & splitting off from airgate Sunday afternoon, I put the metal down and touched (a new high) 115MPH with the top down. Whatarush!
Well...hope folks enjoy the pics. I'm sure Raul will post a fair share as well shortly.
1st trip to *** The Dragon ***
