Riding “The Gauntlet”

My Blue Knights Chapter had scheduled one of its weekday “Hooky Rides” for today and had planned to ride “The Gauntlet” in northern Georgia.  Well, we had only three of us show up for breakfast and to ride.  The Gauntlet is a 133 mile loop showcasing some of north Georgia’s great motorcycling roads.  We began the loop at the intersection of US HWY 19 and US HWY 129 at Turner’s Corner (the bottom of the attached image below, above Dahlonega, and rode it counter-clockwise).  If you’re skilled enough, you can get some wear on the sides of your tires too on this ride.  Two of us today are former motor officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the third is just a flat-out good rider.  Part of this ride literally has North Carolina on one side of the road and Georgia on the other!  For some reason this ride takes all day to complete.  We could’ve easily ridden up to Deal’s Gap and ridden The Tail of the Dragon and come back in the time it took to ride this 133 mile loop.  We had a cloudless blue sky and started with temperatures in the mid 60’s F and reaching 88° F in Dahlonega when we finished.  It really is a fun route to ride.  I wore my new Tourmaster Air Tracker mesh pants and they were great on this warm day.  I also wore my River Road Laughlin jacket, from Motorcycle House, all day, opening the vents in the jacket as it warmed.  The jacket got warm sitting in some traffic in Dahlonega and again in Woodstock on the way home but cooled off as expected once I got moving again.  At the end of the day the Magic Carpet got parked in the garage with 81,473 miles on her odometer.

The Gauntlet is marked in red.