This article is part of the series Postcards to Dad, a five-week motorcycle journey from Savannah to Maine highlighting the Appalachian Trail, with postcards home to Dad from each state on the trail.

The first stop out of Asheville was CVS. I needed some fresh Humalog insulin. I’d been on the road for over a month, and I was starting to question whether the insulin I’d been carrying around was still working as well as it should. With Type 1 diabetes, that’s not something I really want to gamble on. Degradation happens bit by bit, with glucose values that creep up over time, mimicking other issues, making bad insulin hard to detect.

I’ve paid $400 for a vial of insulin twice in my life due to insurance challenges I could not get around. Four hundred dollars! Here’s the part that people don’t often understand. One vial lasts me about ten days. At that price, I’m looking at $1,200 a month, month after month, for the rest of my life. This medication cost $20 in 1996. It’s not inflation at work. There’s no finishing the prescription, getting better, and moving on. I’ve often thought of insulin as this expensive leash I’m tethered to, and no matter how far I travel or what I do with my life, it comes along for the ride.

Now through advocacy and government action, a vial of generic insulin costs $25 as a cash price. On rides like this one, I can now pick up a vial on the road to handle the case where insulin might be bad. I’m still tethered to the drug, and always will be. Now, I can walk into a drugstore anywhere in the country and get a vial for $25, without even having to worry about insurance. This is a remarkable change from what I’ve known to date.

Of course, I somehow managed to spend another $75 on Barebells protein bars, earplugs, Metamucil cookies (yay for middle age), and a Coke Zero. So much for getting out of CVS cheaply. How does that even happen?

Getting in and out of Asheville meant the interstate, and it was full of traffic and construction, the same grind I’d found back in Pennsylvania. South of town, I picked up the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway, then US 441, signed as the Appalachian Highway, and it was the right choice. The expressways were just more casual. I actually got to see some of the local flavor around me, without sealing myself off on the interstate or getting stuck at red light after red light in small towns, which are common on two-lane highways in this part of the country.

Soon after, Atlanta started showing up on the big green signs. After being gone from Georgia for so long, and so far, it felt like a bit of a homecoming. I was headed back to see family again, and even the big green signs around me confirmed that.

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a rattle from the motorcycle around 4,100 RPM. On trips like this, sometimes my anxiety finds things to worry about. Other times, they’re legitimate things to worry about. The challenge is knowing which is which. Once I noticed it, it was definitely there, every time. Other than that one distinct rattle, the rest of the bike seemed fine, so I started keeping the revs out of that range.

At the next gas stop, I wanted to check the oil. The concrete sloped slightly uphill, and getting a fully loaded bike onto its center stand on uneven pavement is no small task. There was a guy milling around at the service station next door, and I kept asking myself whether I should just ask him to straddle the bike and hold it upright for me. I didn’t want to be a bother. I went round and round on that decision longer than I’d like to admit. Eventually, I did my best to pull the bike upright myself and could clearly see enough oil that it wasn’t starving for lubricaiton. I didn’t have the courage to ask. Sheepishness would have to be good enough.

About one o’clock, I pulled into a roadside stop on US-74 and met Patty and Sandra. They were from Texas, in their mid to late 60s, with big blond hair and personalities to match. They’d come all this way because they wanted to see Leanne Morgan. They spotted my SLR camera and asked me to take their photo, and that was all the opening they needed. They wanted my story and were happy to tell theirs. Both of them teared up a bit at mine. Being a touch older than me, they understood the journey I was on: left, right, and center. Theirs was a deep friendship, and Patty admitted she was a little self-conscious about being mistaken for lesbians. Sandra was much more comfortable in her own skin and didn’t seem bothered at all.

“As a 25 year gay man,” I said, “I want to be clear. You don’t have to worry about being confused for lesbians.”

Both of them erupted into laughter. Patty needed that moment. When Sandra understood I was five weeks into a trip on a motorcycle with three small cases, she couldn’t get over it. She grabbed my hand, then pulled me over to her Ford Explorer to show me her shoe collection. Just her shoes took up easily twice the storage I had on my bike. The trunk and backseat were full to the gills with clothes for the weekend.

Once I crossed into Georgia, I turned onto the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway. Richard B. Russell was an American politician. A Southern Democrat, he served as the 66th governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933 before serving in the United States Senate for almost 40 years, from 1933 to 1971. At his death he was the most senior member of the Senate.

I rode past the trailhead for Raven Cliff Falls. Raven Cliffs was our troop’s default, the place we went when there wasn’t another spot that was a clear winner. Today, just about every hike has been mapped on AllTrails. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we did it the old-fashioned way, with paper maps, and sometimes it just wasn’t obvious where to go.

Our scoutmaster was a remarkably kind and consistent man. He made space for people, always took the time, and approached things with a steadiness I appreciate more now than I did then. On every trip, someone from the troop would read Psalm 23 or Psalm 100. He found something in those passages that connected with the nature he was bringing us into, and that became part of how we experienced the mountains together. I can’t not see his presence when traveling these hills.

We weren’t a big troop. By the end, there were just four of us working to finish everything we needed for Eagle, before the next group of Cub Scouts came along and gave the troop a new beginning. Our scoutmaster stayed with us through that. He invested in a bunch of kids who weren’t his own, making sure each of us had the time and support we needed. I’m an adult Scout leader now myself, and it’s given me a much better understanding of what he gave us. The next morning, I sent his son a note to say thank you. It was long overdue.

From there, I took about a 50-mile detour to the old family lake cabin. In May, I sat on the deck and said goodbye to the cabin. This time, I was a visitor, and a bashful one at that. Dad wanted to know how his bushes were doing, so I went to check on them for him.

It was hard to tell whether that was fall settling in, or whether the new owners just didn’t love them nearly as much as my dad did. I took a picture for him. It’s a strange thing, checking on something that isn’t yours anymore. You want it to be doing well. Part of you also wants it to miss you a little. I began to understand my dad in that moment, having gone to find my old V-Strom after selling it. It wasn’t the same bike either.

Then it was back onto Georgia 60 and up into Suches. I’d decided to stop at Woody Gap, one of the common Appalachian Trail crossings we’d used as scouts. As I was chasing the AT stamp set, this seemed like a natural stop. What was different here was that, looking out over the landscape, I could see where the mountains ended. Here, I could see the mountains transition to the Piedmont, Georgia’s rolling hills heading towards its coastal plain beyond Atlanta.

The first time I saw Two Wheels Only, I was a Boy Scout on a trip in the North Georgia mountains. We stumbled onto it by accident, and I remember seeing a place absolutely packed with motorcycles of every kind. Until then, motorcycles had always been something I’d seen one at a time. There was the occasional bike on the road, or the one an upperclassman rode to school. But here was an entire place built around motorcycles, with riders coming together because they loved the same thing. I hadn’t seen motorcycling as a community before. My parents had made it clear I wouldn’t have a bike until after college (not unreasonable), so it might as well have been a ride I wasn’t tall enough for yet.

Seven years after I finally got that first bike, I rode up Georgia 60 and pulled in. It was very much a dream come true. Two Wheels Only sold in the years after that 2008 visit, and a new owner later reopened it as Two Wheels of Suches. I’d been looking forward to staying there on this trip, to spending an evening in a place that had made such an impression on me all those years ago.

I got in just about dark, and my first reaction was disappointment. Everything was closed and shut down, and it didn’t feel very welcoming. I’d felt something similar when I came through in May, on the Life at the Pace of Sweet Tea trip. That had been a Friday afternoon, and everything was closed then, too.

There was no host to greet me, and it wasn’t clear where to go. I didn’t know how to get into the lodge or where my key was. I called the number, and nobody answered. It turned out the host was on the phone with someone else having the same problem. The property itself had seen better days. The paint was peeling, the floors creaked, the linens had seen many nights, and the restrooms looked dilapidated. The restaurant was closed, too, and in Suches that’s a big deal. There’s nowhere else to eat. Dinner was pizza from the gas station, assembled and run through a conveyor belt oven. It was gas station pizza. A crock pot of Cajun boiled peanuts sat on the counter. Neither was a great option.

Honestly, the camping is probably the best thing there now. It’s a self-contained, rough-it kind of place, and you have to arrive in that mindset rather than expecting a lodge or a hotel. But I’d carried the old version around since I was a kid, and it was hard to see a place I loved in decline.

Sportbike Mike had ridden up from north Atlanta on a 2011 GSX-R 750. He said it was about 90 minutes back home. I guessed Alpharetta, and he laughed and said yes. My geography is still pretty good, I thought. I could also see the tension in him. He was enjoying the moment and the conversation, but it wasn’t getting any warmer or any lighter, his bike didn’t have much wind protection, and it was a long ride home. Yet he stayed. We dove into his real estate data business, my own travels. He desired to take a longer trip like mine, and I longed for a four car garage filled with two wheelers like he had.

After Mike left, I wandered out to the camping area, found a small fire, and met Gene and Jim. They were in for the TT50 weekend, which draws a big crowd. Both of them were nice guys. Jim was from Florida and Gene was from Michigan, and they both make the trip down a few times a year. They were probably in their late 60s, still enjoying life on two wheels. I respect that about both of them, and I hope I’m still living that life that well when I’m their age.

What I hadn’t really considered until I started writing this story was how much had happened between those visits. I’d spent five weeks riding around the eastern United States, met people all over the country, and was now sitting around a fire with riders from Florida and Michigan. I was one of the people who had come to Suches on a motorcycle, just as those riders had done when I first discovered the place. It wasn’t something I thought about that night. At the time, I was mostly enjoying the conversation and trying to stay warm. But looking back, I think there’s something satisfying about having lived enough of that childhood dream that it no longer feels extraordinary.

In the morning, it was 35 degrees, frost covered the grass, and fog filled the valley. For once, the bike could wait. I grabbed the camera and spent the morning walking the property and down to the lake nearby, chasing the fog and the frost, and the waterfall that spills out below the lake.

Then I pointed the bike north again, back toward North Carolina.