Motorcycle trip with Bruce

This past Saturday my long time adventure buddy Bill Thrush and I headed
out on a motorcycle trip to visit the “Ark Experience” in Kentucky.
The weather forecast was horrible predicting heavy rain and flooding for
most of our route. Bill and I taught biology together back in the early
70’s and in those days we used to do a lot of winter back packing on
various stretches of the Appalachian Trail. We would have 5 or more guys
scheduled to go and invariably the day or two before, guys would start
fabricating lame excuses not to go when the weather forecast was for
rain/snow or freezing temperatures, or all of the above. Bill and I would
be disappointed as a lot of work had gone into the planning etc.  After
about three such situations, we made a pact that unless either of us were
in the hospital and restrained to our beds  with handcuffs, we would not
cancel out on each other. This began a life long history of hiking, sail
boat trips, quad riding, dirt bike trips and adventure motorcycle trips.
We have never disappointed each other with lame excuses. Yes we have
endured some rough weather like a tornado like storm one night on the
Chesapeake. We tied the hatches on the boat from the inside, donned our
life jackets, tied a cable around the mast and into the water for
lightening protection and huddled inside the small cabin all night while
being thrown around violently in the huge waves hoping the mooring-line
would not break. Then there was the 15 degree below zero camping trip at
the Bruce Lake primitive camping site in Promised Land State Park, where
the steak we had cooked  froze before we could finish eating it. We have
ridden the 15K round trip to Alaska together endured a failed driveshaft
and rotor on his R100GS (thanks Anton for having spares and mailing them
to us) and countless other adventures. So.......Canceling a little
motorcycle trip to Kentucky and West Virginia just because the weather
forecast was grim never crossed our minds.
On Saturday I met Bill out in Shippensburg where he was attending an
Alumni event. Bill is in his late 70’s so this was not a 5th year
reunion😀but he is a good rider and can put miles behind him on or off
road with the best of them. The one caveat is that we must stop regularly
for “nature” stops.  (No Pictures, as he has images of me from years
past that should not see print) Saturday afternoon we did the short run up
over the mountains of central PA to Cranberry which is north of Pittsburgh
to stay with my younger son.  On Sunday with another bad forecast we ran
the slab out to south of Cincinnati into Kentucky to the “Ark
Experience”. A link to all of the trip photos is found at the end of
this post. The Ark is a biblical full size wooden ark built to the specs
found in the book of Genesis in the Bible.  300 cubits  Long, 50 cubits
wide and 30 cubits high with three decks inside and one door on the side.
A cubit was the length of a mans arm from the elbow to the tips of his
fingers or about 18 inches so the ark is 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and
45 feet high. It sits atop concrete pillars, so the actual height of the
structure ends up being nearly 7 stories high. We were told it took 300
Amish craftsmen working on each shift...3 shifts a day for two years to
complete it at a cost of 100 million dollars. It is entirely made of wood
and the timbers are massive. There are no instructions in the Bible as to
other features, but this exhibit is filled with cages constructed to hold
all kinds of land animals, birds and insects. Each has provisions for
feeding watering and waste removal. It is absolutely a site to see if you
are ever in the area. There are storage areas for food, water and oils.
We spent the morning there on Monday then headed over to the state resort
at Pipestem WVA. Bill likes free form trips, so each night I would build a
route quickly in Pocket Earth for the next days navigation, picking the
roads we wanted to ride and stopping at any sites we would pick. On
Tuesday we rode  great back roads over to the Greenbrier Resort to
hob-knob with the truly wealthy DC’ers.Until 1992 the Greenbrier hosted
a bunker where the US President would be taken if real shit hit the fan.
You can now take bunker tours. One day I will take the tour, but not on
this trip.    We then backtracked somewhat to the state resort at Twin
Falls WVA. These state run resorts in WVA are very nice and most have
hotels at the site along with restaurants. The food and service is nothing
to rave about, but the rooms and scenery are fine. On Wednesday Bill
decided we should ride back roads up to Charles Town WVA where they have a
horse race track.  I picked to ride most of the way on US 220 as it is
nothing but great sweepers through farm country and parallels the hated
I-81 to the east. When we arrived we learned that the horses don’t run
on Wednesday’s. So being only 4 hours or so from home we decided to push
on and finish the ride home. We were home right at dark, safe and sound
with over 2,000 miles of great PA, KY, MD and WVA roads behind us. Another
great safe trip to remember when we are in the old folks home!
https://bmckelvy.smugmug.com/MotorcycleAdventures/Ark-trip-2018

Riding to Noah's Ark

Too much rain-heading to the ARK! My friend Bruce and I are riding our bikes to see the ARK in Kentucky. It is built to scale-over 1 1/1 football fields long. (to curtail wise-guy posts-Bruce and I are not part of Noah's "pair of every species")!