Your Best Biking Road?

[pugwash]

I had a cracking day out on capo yesterday with some friends and while riding home started thinking to myself, What is the BEST road I have ever rode on?

I,m not just talking about a road you remember because it had a few good corners or some great backdrop, I'm talking about the type of road that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you think about it, the sort of ride that you think about getting out on when your really having a bad day at work, the road you would ride tomorrow if you could (I sure you get the idea by now)!

Ok to get the ball rolling heres my favorite road I've ever ridden on:

The A939 which is in Scotland and runs from Ballater and goes to Grantown on Spey via the Lecht ski centre, I try to make this a must whenever I'm in Scotland and have gone many many miles out of my way just to ride it. For me it has everything a great road should have with great corners, epic views and rises and falls up over a mountain for good measure. It's not a road you have to ride like your boxers are on fire to make it an experiance and if I had to have a groundhog day it would be on here.

Pugwash

A fully loaded capo about halfway along the A939

[Bigralphie]

In the England A686 to Alston Cumbria
Kinlochleven loop in Scotland
road to the Pondarosa cafe in Wales
Le Chambres to Susa (France to Italy)

[weasel221]

lower Rt28 to Franklin, Tn....

if any of y'all get to the Dragon, after the obligatory Dragon Run, head south on Rt28, MUCH better...little to no traffic, NO COPS!!! and just as good if not BETTER than Dragon...really, anything below the Dragon...N Georgia has excellent roads to explore...WarWoman Rd, Wayah Rd[sp?]...

[Stanleybobly]

Capo's natural habitat

[Parx400]

Come on guys how about some rough roads. Here is a few shots of me.



Coming down from the Sonora Pass

[the_toe_cutter]

The Vee, near the borders of Co Tipperary, Limerick and Cork. Capo with ricor front and back is very happy up here!


A mountain forestry road near where i live thats great craic for when i feel up to 'easy dirt', as i put it.

[Precis]

Great idea for a thread!

Best roads I ever rode are mostly in South Africa: from Cape Town you can easily ride seven different mountain passes in a 300km day, or 9 if you're up for a longer day in the saddle. All of them crawl up the side, over (or through!) and down very chunky mountains of varying altitude. Or you can ride around the Cape peninsula - costal roads cut into cliffs over crashing waves, dotted with beachside villages - so lots of chances for refreshments while watching the beach-life.

Then there's Sani Pass which has a ZA border post at the bottom and the Lesotho border at the top; Wikipedia says it is "approximately 9 km in length and requires above average driving experience. It has occasional remains of vehicles that did not succeed in navigating its steep gradients and poor traction surfaces, and has a catalogue of frightening stories of failed attempts at ascending the path over the Northern Lesotho mountains."
Sani was dirt, though there was a plan to tar it, as it's a major supply route for "The Kingdom in the Sky". I've done it up and down, with bikes, 4x4s and quads; it's a series of hairpins that are much more fun going uphill!

And Long Tom Pass is a high-speed winding road between the towns of Lydenburg and Sabie; it's named after a 6" cannon that the Boers used to shell the shit out of the British during the Boer War and a replica sits at the highest point of the pass. The whole area is a biker's heaven with about 300km of winding twisty roads and several small towns like Pilgrims Rest (the Royal Hotel there used to be a church over the border in Mozambique, but was moved on ox-wagons and became a pub!) and viewpoints like God's Window and The Devil's Knuckles; it was a gold-mining area, but now exists on tourism and forestry.

In Italy, well, anything that links Sant A'gata, Mandello del Lario, Moderna, Maranello and Rimini with Monza, Imola and Como has to be good!

In the UK: some of the winding backroads in damp Devon (where it rains six days out of seven!) can be interesting - humpback bridges, deep cuttings and sudden flocks of sheep can all test the nerves!

Here in Australia the roads are infested by revenue-collectors and there are rumblings of lowering the already antiquated speed limits even further; it seems our leftie government will soon create 0% unemployment by having a man with a red flag walking in front of every motorised vehicle. What a novel idea.
In the Outback - well, the scenery's pretty flat - but does gradually change quite a lot and the roads vary from thick gelatinous mud in the wet season to fine wind-blown talcum-powder dust in the dry season. Both are at least a foot deep. Or there are rocks. Don't know how deep they are.
A few years ago a I rode a postal delivery bike (110cc semi-auto Honda step-through) from Brisbane to Adelaide through the Outback - a distance of 3000km. First thing I learned: at the Honda's top speed of 70km/h, you can't (well, I couldn't anyway) hold your breath long enough to escape the smell of dead animal carcases alongside the road.
Second thing: if you're passed by a road train (kick-ass big truck towing three full-sized trailers), you WILL get sucked into the vortex being the truck. This increases a) the Honda's top speed to 130km/h, where cylinder heads melt, and b) the chance of your wearing whatever is excreted by whatever the truck's carrying: usually sheep or cattle. They generally only excrete two things - and you don't want to be near either of them.

But with the Capo, my favourite road is my driveway:

[brmbrm]

Anywhere in Spain , off themain roads.




When visiting Spain next, and you go to Granada via the E902 Dual Carriageway from Motril to Granada and visit the top of the Sierra Nevada (yawn!)
But return via the A4050 which is to the West of the Dual Carriageway, through to Otivar and back to the A7 Coast road, near Almunecar.
This road is across a plain surrounded by mountains and then drops like a Helter-Skelter to the coast.
No pics, sorry, but zoom in on Google Street view if you plan to go there.