North Carolina March 7 – March 9, 2017 101 miles
We rode some of our initial North Carolina miles with some of our favorite people on post at Fort Bragg. This was in December 2014 – Best rides ever!
Back to 2017 – we left Denver, NC for Jordon Lake Crosswinds Campground, state campground. Really nice place to stay and just a short distance from American Tobacco Trail, our next ride. It was a beautiful long ride and very isolated until we were near Durham. Trail heads were the nicest we’ve seen. We really enjoyed this ride – rail trail sometimes high above valley, tall pine forests. Perfect weather. All together awesome.
The next day we road the Neuse River Trail. We will always remember this trail because we crossed 32 bridges and that was one way. We may have lost count at some point, but that was a lot of bridges. The trail ended at a large dam where we had lunch and enjoyed watching fly fishermen. We saw a beaver on the trail. I had never seen a beaver in the wild. 36 miles yesterday and 35 miles today.
Third day of riding in North Carolina and we headed for Lake Johnson to ride the Walnut Creek Trail. There were some really brutal hills at the start of this trail, then some construction which had us searching for the correct way to go. Not our favorite trail – Around Johnson Lake it was beautiful, other areas a little sketchy and a pretty ride near NC State campus. A lady in the parking lot saw our OSU flag and gave us a buckeye. She was excited to see Buckeye fans.
We had hoped to head for Ohio but the weather was not cooperating. The cold weather was coming pretty far south so we decided to go to South Carolina. We stayed at Ocean Lakes south of Myrtle Beach. We spent 9 days here waiting for a break in the weather. We love the beach so it was not a hardship.
- Smith Lake Trail – Fort Bragg
- American Tobacco Trail
- Neuse River Trail
- Walnut Creek – Johnson Lake