The Bicycle Inn, Bakersville, NC - my weekend recap
I posted some of this in the southeast thread, but I thought I'd share the full recap here. If anyone has opportunity to travel to NC to ride (either mtn or road), I highly recommend a trip to this place. It's totally worth the trip!!
http://www.bicycleinn.com
The Bicycle Inn is a Bed & Breakfast in Bakersville, NC that essentially caters to cyclists. The owner is an avid cyclist (has completed the Assault on Mt Mitchell over 25 times!) and a wonderful host. The inn has 5 rooms all decorated with a ‘theme’ related to cycling (like ‘Eddy’s Room’ for Eddy Merckx) and a main gathering room that looks like a cycling history museum. In addition, the entire inn is full of bicycle items from posters and photos, to jerseys, shoes, parts, stickers, and of course, bikes. Michael and Paulette Davis are the owners and they also host the yearly “Roan Moan” ride which leaves from right out in front of their place. We had plans to meet up with 4 other cycling couples from our town at the inn for a weekend of riding. This is our story…
On Friday we arrived at about 2 pm and hung out on the huge porch for a bit, explored the inn, went for a walk and just relaxed until the next couples arrived. The organizing couple got there around 3, so by 4 pm, we were all out on the road doing the “Frankie and Charlie” ride. Michael (the innkeeper) led the ride, provided commentary and took a bunch of photos. It was 25 miles of ‘rolling’ terrain. We quickly discovered that rolling is a relative term because as compared to Greensboro; it was much more than just ‘rolling’! 24.7 miles and 1700 ft of climbing. I got dropped pretty quickly on the descents, but I always caught up on the climbs. By the end, I’d gotten much better at descending and I was really enjoying myself. The weather was perfect (the rain had cleared about 2 hours prior to the start) and the scenery was spectacular.
The other couples had arrived by the time we got back, so we showered quickly and then met them at the local country club for dinner. Michael and Paulette joined us. Afterward, we all hung out on the porch at the inn drinking wine and getting to know each other a bit. We retired fairly early in preparation for Saturday’s ride.
On Saturday, we awoke early, had coffee and generally lounged around while Michael prepared breakfast. There was a huge feast of options (eggs, fake bacon, pancakes, bagels, homemade breads, cereal, fruit, etc). After eating, we all changed and we were on the road by 9 am. The route was the Roan Moan Metric (67 miles, actually) and it took us around to the TN side of Roan (via Iron Mountain) over the mountain, and then back down the NC side. When we headed out, I felt pretty good, so I was hoping that my legs would be fresh enough to do the ride. I hadn’t slept well the night before worrying about it. Everything was fine until we got to the Iron Mtn climb. It was pretty steep and about 3 miles long. I found that my easiest spin cadence kept spiking my heart rate, so I had to dial it back. Unfortunately, doing so wore out my legs, so I was kind of at a loss. I ended up having to stop twice on the ascent to bring the HR down. I still made it up fairly quickly though. After a rest at the top to await the whole group, we began the descent. What fun! By the time we were needing to actually pedal again, I realized that my legs were already pretty spent. We had a nice ride to the base of Roan including a fun section that followed an old railroad bed (the Tweensie RR) that had been paved. We stopped at a store (with a restroom, yippee!) for supplies about 3 miles from the base of Roan Mtn. The climb up Roan was a tough 8 miles. I made it the first 2 miles, and then had to stop to rest. I was able to keep my HR in control by slowing my cadence, but it was killing my legs. I rested at about 2 miles, again after 3 miles and then from there on up, every once in awhile I pulled over to rest the legs. I did not walk once, though! And I did try doing a few switchbacks to help as well but there was just nothing left in my legs. I actually made it to the top in good time, so I think that if I had a 29 tooth ring in my cassette, I would have been fine. The alternative (and my goal) is to improve my leg strength and my heart strength…and to drop some weight. The rest of the ride was pretty much all down hill (for the most part) back to the inn. 67 miles and about 6000 ft of climbing.
After the ride, we all got cleaned up as we had 5 pm reservations at The Toe River Lodge. We ate out on the ‘hummingbird porch’ and it was amazing food. Seriously…we were totally fine with spending $80/couple (no booze!) on it, because it was fan-freaking-tastic (and not just because we were starving from riding those miles!). I had a chocolate French toast thing with home-made vanilla ice cream for desert and it was incredible! After dinner, we returned to the inn and hung out on the porch recapping the days’ stories. We all retired fairly early as we were wiped out.
Sunday morning we awoke fairly early again, had breakfast and then we all loaded up the cars with our bike stuff and headed over to do the ‘River Ride’. This was a flat 40 mile ride that follows the Toe and Cane rivers. For a long section of it, the road was recently paved, so the lead group got ‘sucked’ into a paceline and we kind of hammered for a few miles. Average speed was around 20 mph for that section (not exactly recovery pace). When we stopped at an intersection, we all decided that it was time to take it back a notch or two as this was supposed to be a recovery ride! It was a really nice ride overall. There was only one real climb that occurred at about 2/3rd of the way into the ride. After that hill, it was pretty much a slight downhill all the way back to the cars for about 10 miles. In those 10 miles, the lead group of guys all took off. Another woman and I hung on as best that we could for quite a while averaging about 23 – 24 mph and it was great fun. We both let off at about the same time. We still had about 2 miles left and I had decided that it was time to ‘cool down’ and relax a bit. She said she was thinking the same thing. My husband hammered all the way to the end and was quite proud of himself for keeping up. 39.8 miles and I’m guessing about 800 ft of climbing (my HRM memory filled up, so I lost most of the trip data for this day).
After the ride, we went back to the inn, showered, packed up and said our good byes. We paid Michael and he gave us each a CD full of all the photos he took over the weekend (about 400 of them!!).
It was a wonderful time. We will definitely be going back and next time, I’ll take my laptop so that I can unload my bike computer periodically (plus, they have WiFi at the Inn). The only down side to the whole weekend was that the inn doesn’t have TV. I had thought it would have been fun to watch the TdF with a group of cycling enthusiasts, but we were able to catch recaps via the internet.
