Sam,
Thanks for the pictures and commentary. The Raven picture is incredible, what an amazing coincidence! That one is worthy of entering a Photo Contest!!
Brian

 

Sam, as the others have said, thanks for taking us along on this great journey. I've always wanted to do something similar and now I sort of know what it would be like. Someday maybe.

 

Century fighter: F101 Voodoo pair of J57 with a/b.

 

Beautiful! You have taken the forum to new heights.

 

If you wan't to see moose, why not try a trip to Canada....the last true frontier in N. America.
P.S. We have good Jag Dealers in most of our cities in case you run into one.


Stainless (Stan)

2005 XK8 since new

 

Great pics Rev. I've been to some of those locations. Makes me want to go again. You know your way around a camera as well as a Jag.

 

I was just reminiscing and thought I'd upload a few pics I never posted back then.

Here's my favorite toy somewhere in southern Utah or Northern Arizona:



Oh yeah... my Jag is in that picture, too, in case you hadn't noticed. It's the big silvery thing.

And here's my boss somewhere in Utah.



This is somewhere in the mountains of Utah:



This is in the mountains near Ruidoso, New Mexico. I wish that railing wasn't there. The pic would be 100 times better with no railing.



I'll look for some more good ones later. It's past my bedtime.

 

Nice backdrop, but girl not scantily clad and pose only slightly alluring.

Fail.

 

And here are a few more...

As we left North Carolina we got off of I-40 in Marion, North Carolina and drove up highway 80 to the Blue Ridge Parkway. For those of you unfamiliar with the BRP, it's a road, but it's also a national park. It's several hundred miles long through the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina and the maximum speed is 45 miles per hour. It's a very twisty, curvy, two-lane road with lots of tunnels and places to pull off to take in the stunning views. Commercial vehicles aren't allowed, so you won't see any big trucks.

Here's the Jag at one of the overlooks somewhere along the BRP. There were puffy clouds all around, so one minute we'd be driving in bright sunlight and the next minute we'd be in dense fog. You can see the fog 100 meters away in the background, yet my car is in the sun.



The whole trip was supposed to be about staying off of the main roads, staying away from chain restaurants, and staying at cheap, "Bates Motel" type motels. The motel we picked the first night convinced us to be a little more selective going forward. It was late in the evening and foggy when we finally came down off of the Blue Ridge Parkway and found this motel in Asheville, NC. My wife and I were both in an adventurous mood. When I went into the motel office to ask about the rate, the owner sized me up, looked out the window at my car, and in a thick, barely understandable middle-eastern accent told me it was $50. After getting the key and going to our room I was pretty sure that the normal rate was probably $20-$25, but he saw the car and decided we could pay more. If we had driven by the hotel during the day when there was no fog, we never would have stopped, but at night, with fog so thick we couldn't see from one end of the motel to the other, we couldn't see how bad the motel actually looked.



Crossing Tennessee the next day, we Went to a state park that's about 10 miles off of I-40 called Burgess Falls State Park. A 1 mile hiking trail takes you to three different waterfalls, each one bigger than the last one.

Here is the middle waterfall. It's actually 80 feet tall, which is hard to tell in this picture.



And here's the big, main waterfall. It's 136 feet tall. You can actually walk all the way down to the base of the falls and swim in the river down there!



This is the stairway bolted to the side of the canyon wall that takes you down to the bottom.



And this is the view from the bottom of the falls. On this day there wasn't much water flowing over the falls.



Next stop: Memphis.

 

Nothing exciting happened in Memphis, so I'll skip straight to Northern Arkansas. We went canoeing on the Buffalo River in the Ozark Mountains. I posted pics from there way back on page 2 or 3, so I won't repeat those. The funny thing about Northern Arkansas, however, is that almost everyone drives pickup trucks or old beat up cars (at least that's the way it was where we were driving). My car stood out like a sore thumb. A highly polished, beautiful, curvaceous, sexy sore thumb. People were gawking at it wherever we went. This is a typical scene from the area around the Buffalo River:

 

I'm glad nothing exciting happened to you in Memphis. As a resident, I can tell you that most of the exciting stuff is the sort of stuff to make the lead news story. Yes, if it bleeds, it leads.

Let me know next time you pass through. There are a few things worth stopping for.

Northern AK? NOTHING worth stopping for until you hit the Ozarks.

Happy trails.

-lux

 

We did hang out on Beale Street after we checked into the Hampton Inn there on Beale Street. When I was in the Marines I was stationed at Millington for a while, so I'm familiar with Memphis' "issues". We ate at Dyer's Burgers there on Beale because I had seen it on the Food Network. For those of you who have never heard of it, they deep fry their burgers and they haven't changed the grease since 1912. Hundred year old grease is supposed to give the burgers their flavor.

Here's their website: http://www.dyersonbeale.com/