We got a bit of a late start today since it didn’t warm up outside as quickly as we had hoped that it would, and we ended up taking a nap. We pulled out of the driveway around 2pm and decided to head up to Brown County to do some exploring.

We started out taking a back road that we’ve taken a lot, but we turned down a road we hadn’t been down before, and it turned out to be a beautiful route. The fields were all covered in either bright purple, or bright green, and back behind them there were tree covered hills. The houses and farms were almost all well kept and beautiful, and I told Dwayne that it would be a great area to build a house if some land ever came up for sale there.

Neither of us had lunch before we left, and we were getting rather hungry, so we took Hwy 135 up to Nashville to eat at the Big Woods Brewing Company. We have been there a a handful of times, and although it is a small place and the service is usually kind of lacking, the food has always been great. I got blackened Mahi Mahi street tacos, and Dwayne got baked mac ‘n cheese with pulled pork, which was delicious, huge, and absolutely loaded with beer cheese and pulled pork. That was fortunate, since I ended up eating about a third of it because my tacos were tiny and awful. Literally everything else I’ve ever had there has been good, and his was fantastic, so I’ll give them a pass, but if you ever go there, do yourself a favor and don’t get the Mahi Mahi tacos.

While we were there, we noticed a girl sitting alone at the bar who was wearing riding gear and had a motorcycle helmet beside her on the bar. I passed her on my way back from the bathroom and asked her what she was riding. She gave me a hateful glance and mumbled something inaudible, so I told her I didn’t hear her. Clearly annoyed by me, she said, “A Yamaha.” I asked her what model, and she said it was an FZ6. I told her, “Oh, cool! I used to have an FZ6R before I got my Triumph Tiger.” which is when the light bulb went off in her brain and she finally looked at me long enough to realize that I was also wearing riding pants and a Deals Gap t-shirt.  She kind of apologized for being rude, saying she is just used to people asking who don’t know anything about bikes, or just assuming that she is riding a Harley, which I get, but that’s still no reason to just be downright rude to someone. What if I had been someone who has always wanted to ride but has never had anyone to ride with? Women should be more welcoming and supportive of one another than that. We exchanged a bit of small talk before she left, but I was so put off by her initial attitude, I really didn’t care after that.

After we ate and left the restaurant, I was still a bit bothered by her behavior, but then we found some gravel and I was over it 😉 Then we found this cool old iron pony truss bridge and I was even more over it…

I remarked to Dwayne how funny it is that we keep finding these old bridges so often on our rides. I’ve become a little bit of a bridge geek because of it. I even have a list of all of the through truss bridges that are still standing that I want to check out this summer.  Some of them are abandoned and out in the middle of nowhere, and will only be accessible on the bikes if we get a bit of a drought this summer because the abandoned roads they are on flood easily.

Eventually our gravel road turned to pavement, and then it came out on Hwy 46 South of Nashville. We decided to go West a bit and find a county road to the South to see where we ended up. After turning down one gravel road that just looped us back to 46, and then turning down another that we realized was a dead-end too late, we finally found a really great gravel (mainly dirt) road that went up over a ridge through the Yellowwood State Forest. It ended up going down by Lake Monroe, then turning back to the North, where it came out by the T.C. Steele Historic Site. We stopped to check the map to see exactly where we were, and it turned out we were only about two miles from where we had turned off of 46, so it was just a long detour, but it was beautiful and fun, so we will call that a win!

At this point it was starting to get later in the evening, and we were still an hour from home, so we decided we’d better start heading back. We were retracing our route from earlier, but we got behind a pickup, and when he realized we were behind him, he started driving faster than is advisable on such a curvy country road, which nearly resulted in him hitting a big truck head on. I’m still not sure how he kept from hitting it, but I do know that my heart and lungs both stopped for a good five seconds. I’ll never understand why people do this. They’ll be driving normal, or maybe even slow, and then they see us in the mirror and feel like they have to speed up and drive faster than they should. I don’t know if they think they are holding us up, or if they just want to see how fast we’ll go, but we were just out cruising back roads, not trying to race, so he really didn’t have to do that.

Dwayne suggested we turn off and take another road that we knew of that had a creek crossing on it. The last time we rode it, there was only an inch or two of water, but we got a lot of heavy rain Monday night, so it was quite a bit deeper today, and I was super excited, so I made Dwayne take my phone and go first and then video me crossing, since this was my first time crossing a creek that actually had more than a couple of inches of water in it. It was a blast and I can’t wait to do more of it!

The rest of the ride home was pretty tame. The wind picked up a bit, and it started to feel cooler, so we timed it perfect getting home just before the sun would start to set. It looks like rain is going to be an issue starting tomorrow and all the way through next week, so I’m not sure when we will get to ride again. We have a lot of wrenching we need to do on the vintage bikes though, so we will just have to spend some quality time in the garage.