- Week Alabama, it's not like they said!

[klaviator]

One guy hauled his bike there so his truck was used to rescue the broke down XT226.

David on his Van Van

We eventually got on the road. Some of these roads were new to me.

We rode the "whale snot" trail.

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Tracy, our ride leader was on a TW200.

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[klaviator]

Most of us rode through the whale snot which wasn't that slick this time and parked on the deep sand.

I couldn't leave my bike until someone gave me a piece of wood to put under my kickstand.

We walked back to the scenic area. For some reason I have been unable to take any pics which do this beautiful spot any justice.

Family portrait.

Our parking lot on the edge of the Sipsey River.

 

[klaviator]

When it was time to head back I rode ahead, parked my bike and got set up to document the carnage

David on his DR650 made it look easy.

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Preston on his AT made the mistake of following Tracy on his TW200. He saw that line wouldn't work for him and backed up.

The new line didn't work so well.

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[klaviator]

Eventually I stopped taking pics and helped get the bike out of the rut.

With the show over everyone headed up the trail

Everyone else took the good line through that section.

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[klaviator]

We got back on pavement for a while. We were headed towards an area I wasn't familiar with. We eventually turned off on a gravel road and took a break. People who had munchies ate them after Tracy said it was still a ways until lunch and it was well after lunchtime already.

We rode some gravel.

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[klaviator]

We got back on the pavement until we got to what kind of looked like a four lane divided highway.....except it was gravel

We rode down the left lane which was probably the wrong lane for the direction of traffic but there was no traffic other than us so it didn't matter.

We came to a couple of big bridges that looked to be pretty new.

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This was an abandoned road project near Russellville. We hung out on the bridge for a while.

I had plenty of time to take pics.

We saw a trail that went down under the bridges so naturally some of us had to ride it. It turned out to be covered with the gravel from hell. Riding on gravel has often been described as riding on marbles. This was like riding on baseballs.

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At least we had an audience to cheer us on

 

[klaviator]

The view was worth the ride down. This was an impressive piece of engineering and construction.

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The ride back up was easier than the ride down. I got some pics looking down.

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It's hard to believe they spent all that money to build these bridges and then didn't finish the road. I can't imagine the road would cost as much as these bridges did.

 

[klaviator]

More pics from the bridges and abandoned connector.

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I found this little lake.

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This was the second set of bridges.

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[FLrider]

Awesome to read about those abandoned projects/roads... Google-fu abandoned roads and plenty of it shows up. Here's just one example of many..

Unused highway - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[klaviator]

Here is a drone video showing the abandoned connector and bridges. One of the guys on the ride found this while researching this.

 

[klaviator]

There was a lot of discussion on this abandoned project in my ride report on the other forum. Someone found that these bridges cost over $40 million. This was my thoughts on this project:

$40 million to amuse 10 dual sport riders for about an hour......sounds reasonable to me

I think that if they aren't going to pave it they should turn it into some sort of tourist attraction and make money from it. Call it the Bridges to Nowhere. They could sell T shirts. They could set up a restaurant & tourist shop at one end to sell those T-shirts and stickers. Maybe they could get Killboy to send a photographer to take your pic as you rode buy. All those tourists would eat at local restaurants and stay in local motels and raise tax revenue. They could let the road itself really deteriorate which would attract adventure riders from around the world.

 

[klaviator]

Tracy picked a great place for lunch. It wasn't anything fancy, just great food, great service and very reasonable prices.

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After lunch the two riders with the biggest bikes headed for home. That left 8 of us and the three 410cc Himalayans as the biggest bikes.
Tracy lead us through some pretty countryside and surprisingly fun curvy roads.

I haven't spent much time in this area so these roads were new to me.

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[klaviator]

Tracy is faster on the road than you would expect from a TW200.

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I had no idea where we were.

The problem was, sometimes our ride leader didn't either

That's OK. I was enjoying the ride and figured we would eventually find our way back.

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We stopped a few times while Tracy tried to figure out where we were and where we needed to go.

 

[FLrider]

"I'm their leader, which way did they go??" comes to mind......

 

[klaviator]

"I'm their leader, which way did they go??" comes to mind......

That leads perfectly into my next post!

After the last stop we took off and our leader still wasn't sure where we needed to go. We backtracked a ways, stopped, and then continued. After a while I didn't see anyone behind me so I slowed way down. Tracy then did a u turn and I followed him. We found everyone waiting at a turn we had missed

That was the correct turn and it led us down some gravel roads for a while.

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We stopped at an intersection and took a break. From there we split into two groups with only four of us heading back towards Danville.

One more split off for home and I led the remaining three back to Danville.

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[klaviator]

After a break at the Danville Gas Station I headed for home. With the sun setting I couldn't resist stopping to take some pics.

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Approaching home it the weather looked nasty ahead.

Not long after I got home a heavy rain shower came through. I was glad I wasn't out riding in it. I ended up riding around 240 miles.

 

[FLrider]

Great story and nice photos!

 

[klaviator]

While I enjoy going on day or longer rides, many of my rides are pretty short. Sometimes I jump on one of my bikes at the last minute, chase the sunset and hope for some good pics. That was what I did this evening.

With clouds on the horizon it didn't look promising but since I was out here I figured I might as well take some pics.

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As sunset go, this one was pretty weak. Oh well, might as well enjoy the ride so I looped around the airport because that route had a few good curves Maybe there would be an interesting airplane to take pics of.

C-17!

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I hadn't ridden since Saturday so it was good to get out even if it was a short ride!

 

[xr-nut]

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These 2 pictures should be christmas cards. nice work klav

 

[klaviator]

These 2 pictures should be christmas cards. nice work klav

Thanks! It's not often that Alabama looks like a winter wonderland so I took a bunch of pics when I had the chance.