October 2, 2025 58.40 miles / 4222 feet
Lisa and I decided to break up the drive from Milwaukee to Lake Lure, North Carolina with a ride. Since southern Illinois was on the way and I knew of the from my days living in Kentucky we picked a Strava route of reasonable length, “A shawnee gravel expedition from eddyville.” I will save you the suspense, do not use this route! It started out as a typical gravel ride, chipseal reads, fast gravel and such. However, about 20 miles in, the track turned right past a closed gate. We were in the National Forest, no cell service, and the map on my Garmin showed the map we were on just looping back on it’s self. So past the gate we went. Pretty quickly the double track degraded into single track, then to a unused hiking trail and finally into an abandoned logging road. The track on the garmin did show it connecting back onto a main road and we did not want to backtrack so we continued on. When the logging road hit a creek crossing, I said enough. Looked at the map and saw we were only a few hundred feet from a rail road. So we beelined it to the rail road and started the very bumpy 2 mile ride to a paved road. Somewhere along the way the bumping must of activated the SOS feature on the iPhone, or maybe my Apple watch. Anyway, when I got to road and pulled out my phone I saw several text messages from a 911 operator telling me that help way on the way. After calling off the rescue, we were back on our way. Other than the type 2 fun in the middle, the ride was pretty good! Moral of the story is precheck any new courses, before uploading them to your navigation device.
