70-degrees and rising

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It may be a strange combination of businesses, but common enough in north Georgia. This is in downtown McCaysville.

The Ides of March marked misfortune and doom for the ancient Romans, but in 2026, the month didn’t start out that way in the North Carolina mountains.

March 1 marked sunny, beautiful motorcycle weather in the western mountains.

You take what you can get. The thermometer eventually reached 73 at mid-afternoon.

Today I rode over the mountains to Mineral Bluff, Georgia, hooked a right and motored to McCaysville, Georgia, which shares a main street — Toccoa Avenue — with Copperhill, Tennessee.

The side-by-side towns are popular with tourists, and the sun had brought them out today in plentiful abundance to visit the shops that line the streets here.

Alongside U.S. 64 at Ducktown, Tennessee.

The Toccoa River flows 56 miles from the south into McCaysville where it loses its name, but not it’s identity. It becomes the Ocoee River just after  it passes under the wood-floored truss bridge on Grand Street, continuing for another 37 miles into Tennessee and the Ocoee Gorge.

The bridge, known as a “camelback truss,” was built in the early 1900s, probably in 1928, though some date it to 1911. There is a more modern bridge across the river a block to the south at Blue Ridge Drive.
The state line is a few feet north of the older bridge, and that’s where the Toccoa becomes the Ocoee River.
On the Georgia stretch, the Toccoa is lined by tubing outfitters that will open for business as the weather warms, but in Tennessee, especially in the Gorge, the river is primarily a kayaking destination.
After touring the towns, I turned north and headed to U.S. 64 at Ducktown, Tennessee, making a full loop of some 80 miles back to the cabin outside Murphy — but not before I paused for a photo at the North Carolina state line.
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