Lake Lure North Carolina - Three Days of SEVROC

The SouthEast VROC Rally has been a VROC fixture since 1999. In 2001, we relocated it from Suches Georgia to Lake Lure. This year, the attendance was down a little bit but this gave us a chance to meet some new people while enjoying the company of old friends. People came from as far away as New Hampshire, Michigan and Nevada (not to mention Ontario) this year. The weather was cool and wet on Thursday became sunny and warm for Friday and Saturday.

Friday morning, as some people were checking out the GoldWing, my old friend Tomcat noticed a cut across the tread of my front tire. Although not cut right into the tire carcass, it was disturbing. I couldn’t tell if it would be dangerous or not, so the next day a few of us took a run back through the twisties on 74A. It looked to me like that made it worse so we headed off to Hendersonville to find the Honda dealer. I expected a small dealership that would have to order a tire and disrupt out schedule. Instead, we found the largest GoldWing dealer in the world and we were back on the road with a new front tire within an hour. We then invested some time helping Flip, from southern Michigan, try to find his missing tail light assembly and licence plate somewhere along the Eastern Continental Divide on Highway 64. No luck there.

Thursday dinner consisted of a deep fried turkey dinner created by organizer Scott (Hot Sauce) Sprankle and friends. If you have never had turkey prepared this way, you don’t know what you are missing. The ladies took up a collection and arrived with several golf cart loads of firewood, so the socializing took place around the fire for the rest of the evening. Friday night, we opted to try out a brand new Italian restaurant in Lake Lure. You think I would know better than that. They have some bugs to iron out. Saturday there was a catered dinner featuring BBQ pig. It was excellent and the gentlemen doing the catering were very personable. While we had another active bonfire Friday night, Saturday was somewhat subdued as people started getting ready to leave in the morning.

These are the type of gatherings that Sandy and I have decided to make the focus of our motorcycle riding. Although goodbyes were said, they almost always included where people would be in the future. We’ll see some of them this Friday in Port Dover Ontario, others in five weeks in Wisconsin and/or six weeks in Utah, some not until the fall in Arkansas, but it won’t be long until we are together again.