The views were incredible. The trails were endless. The laughs were unrestrained. The friendships are immeasurable.
.
.
.
Birthday Wheeling Trip ’19
It has seemingly become a tradition that a number of us with October birthdays plan a weekend trip to go off road. This year, we continued that tradition. 🙂
Mike, Chris and I rented a lake house via AirBnb that was near Windrock Off Road Park. Windrock is close to Oakridge, Tennessee, a key piece of the Manhattan Project.
Windrock has 73,000 acres and over 300 miles of trails. I’ve been there a couple times before. We covered 50 miles in two days.
We also took a side trip Saturday night to Nemo Tunnel, a since abandoned railroad tunnel. It’s a little less than a half mile long. When you’re in the middle of it, and you turn off all the lights in the Jeep, you can’t see anything. It is pitch black. There’s no light at all for your eyes to even adjust to. Worth the 30 minute trip to get there.
According to the GPS, we spent 16 hours, over 2 days, covering 50 miles of trails. Nothing was overly difficult. Trail 16 was a lot harder when I did this 2 years ago. It’s been dug out a bit and the ledges don’t seem as steep.
The only issue we had was Mike’s passenger side front shock started making noise. We figure out what the problem was and took care of it. One of the things for which a Hi-Lift jack is useful! We needed to relieve the pressure the Jeep was putting on the shock. By jacking up the body and letting the axle droop, it was a simple fix.
Looking forward to wherever our birthdays take us next year! Although I am not looking forward to cleaning my Jeep.
