Lessons learned from a motorcycle trip through small towns

I didn't gain a lot of weight, I'm wearing all the shirts I brought because it's freakin' cold in these mountains! Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah Forest NC

For some crazy reason, I decided it would be fun to ride with my honey on his motorcycle from Florida to North Carolina. Not really so crazy. One reason is I love my honey and we have fun on trips and another reason is I love North Carolina. And adventures. Who doesn't love an adventure? So we packed up the motorcycle and took off.

Ha-ha, that sounds so easy, doesn't it?

Nooooo, it's abso-positively-freakin' not so easy! Let me tell you, packing for a motorcycle adventure when there is a thirty-degree difference in the weather across four states is a hair-pulling challenge. See those saddlebags? I get to use one of them and some "trunk" space for all my shit.

Then, I have to deal with the care of animals and my business while I'm away along with a thousand other things. And of course, there are the things that go wrong right before a trip like a flat tire on Honey's car, someone hacking my debit card, and fun stuff like that. But we leaped through those hurdles and FINALLY made it out of town.

It was a delightful trip and we had an excellent time taking non-highway roads. You see the best stuff on the backroads in small towns! One of my favorites: the Christmas tree car air freshener in the tiny, stinky, outside gas station bathroom. Way to put out minimal effort, dudes. (My continual question as I peed my way up North: Why the fuck don't you spend a wee bit of time actually cleaning your bathrooms to make them a little bit, I don't know, less hideous?)

Have no fear; I saw lovely things, too, not just dirty bathrooms. It all makes the trip memorable. See below. 

Coming home we stopped in Jesup, GA, and the plan was to stay at one of the hotels in this small town. There weren't many choices and according to Trip Advisor reviews, nothing was going to be great. We had to pick the lesser of the evils. My choice A looked worse from the outside than the second runner-up so we went with choice B.

The older man checking us in was slow and made us repeat everything twice. The vending machine was out of everything, the pool area was padlocked shut, and the room was like the creepy rooms you see in haunted houses where the lights flicker right before a demon jumps out at you. I mean, how hard is it to fix a crack in the shower floor and what the hell did someone do to make it in the first place? Jumping jacks in the shower?

​But the room was cheap, the air conditioner cranked out cold air and again, our choices were limited.

Dinner at a local restaurant was okay; the food was fine, and the service was decent, but we were billed for four meals instead of two. The staff took care of it though they didn't offer much in the way of an apology. (An "I'm sorry, our bad" goes a long way in the service industry, folks.) I like to think the best of people but part of me wondered if we were being scammed in a Dum-dum Tourist Trap. 

So far, Jesup was not impressing us and it looked like our last overnight stay on this epic trip would turn out to be a big, fat bummer. But then; heaven. We discovered the local craft brewery, Union Station Brewing.

I saw it on the way into the small downtown area so we walked there after dinner. Let me tell you all of the things that made my heart happy there.

• Good craft beer
• A sweet dog
• A group of people doing an amazing dance that involved much boot stomping. They won an award at a fair for this dance, I was told
• A cute kid who got me free popcorn
• Super friendly locals who told us about how they turned an old hotel into an axe-throwing place, then added a craft brewery, a beer garden, and more to come. Color me impressed, guys!
• An actual hole in the brick wall that separated the two sections and served as the doorway. Neither my honey nor I noticed the large, gaping door hole at first. In my defense; when there's dancing going on I'm distracted 
• A cute cat that prowled around on the bar and clearly owned the joint

Suddenly, Jesup wasn't such a bad place after all. 

The hotel turned out to be fine. The owner assured us that he and his people would be there 24/7 to watch the motorcycle and keep it safe and they did. The super-hot shower water did a fine job relaxing my tired muscles and neither of us fell into the portal to hell in the floor. Breakfast wasn't spectacular but it did the job. 

​On the way out at our gas fill-up, the kind clerk must have noticed the dazed I'm-so-tired-of-sitting-on-a-motorcycle look in my eyes and gave me my iced coffee for free.
Small towns in America; you rock! Just clean your bathrooms, okay?

Look at these guys dancing! A wonderful venue for beer drinking and axe throwing.

A very cool design made with yarn. People could take a piece of cloth and write something and tie it to the image. I added one of my favorite sayings, "Little by little one travels far." Hope. Indeed.

Transylvania County NC, home of many waterfalls. Maybe some vampires, too.