By Oliver A. Emberger

The day started foggy, conjuring images of a room filled with cigars and cigar smoke.

By the time the sun broke through, I was in Alabama, where I was planning to camp for the night.

I envisioned this ride as a five-state trail, with the ignition point in Tampa, Florida, the birthplace of the American cigar trade—an industry, like sugar, that often gets attention, but needs no introduction.

I started the ride in historic Ybor City in Tampa, Fla.—ground zero— at the brick-front cigar factory on the corner of Paseo De Gonzmart and North 21st Street, where they are still rolling cigars, a reminder of the old cigar press days.

Commercial cigar rolling first came to Florida in the 1830s and, in the decades after the Civil War, it became a major industry in the southeastern United States. It grew from small-scale operations started by Cuban immigrants to encompass large factory operations that attracted immigrants from throughout Europe and Latin America to Florida’s growing cities.

I continued to ride the crosstown expressway to another historic place, the J.C. Newman Cigar Co. in Tampa. I got a special tour of the manufacturing facility.

J.C. Newman dates back to 1895, when Julius Caeser Newman rolled his first cigars in the family barn in Cleveland, Ohio. The company moved to Tampa in 1954 and began focusing on premium cigars, capitalizing on the city’s reputation for great cigars and its nearness to Cuban tobacco.

Leaving the factory, I flicked the ash from my cigar, went kickstand up and cruised the two hours to Florida Sun Growers in Clermont, Fla.

FSG started in 2012, when the Corona Cigar Co. bought 20 acres of farm land and began growing tobacco from Cuban Corojo seed. FSG tobacco is used in a handmade cigar from the Drew Estate brand. You even get to sample a single, dried and cured leaf, which provides a very different taste experience, without the filler, binder and wrapper.

Rain riding

The second day out was muggy, leaving a thin sheen on my gear.

I rode against the Alabama sun, unlayering riding gear by the hour. Crossing into Mississippi, the landscape leveled out, and the horizon seemed to widen in all directions.

Arriving at my campsite with just enough light to claim my solitary place among the myriad oak trees and leaves, I decided not to build a campfire. The local weather report predicted bad weather for my trek to Hot Springs, Ark. A band of rain was moving about the same speed as my Yamaha Super Tenere through the Mississippi Delta.

As predicted, Day 3, brought a light rain, coupled with silky pin-drop-sized droplets that stuck like magnets to my windshield. Luckily, I got to cross the mighty Mississippi River into a very warm and friendly Arkansas, where I was welcomed by Lake Village Bend on state Route 278.

 

 

Navigating the mountains

After a quick lunch, the frenetic riding pace picked up again, and most of the afternoon was spent navigating and crisscrossing highways and byways that eventually ended in Hot Springs, where two seasonal hot steam baths remain open to the public.

I opted for the hot showers of the campsite, instead, and hunkered down to program the next day’s ride into the Ouachita Mountains.

The Ouachitas are a major physiographic province of Arkansas and Oklahoma and are generally grouped within the Arkansas River Valley. Together with the Ozark Plateaus, the Ouachitas form the U.S. Interior Highlands, one of few mountainous regions between the Appalachians and Rockies.

I used the few early hours of dryness to explore mountain Forest Road 54/153 off State Route 7. It was a lot harder to get down this forest road than it appeared on Maps.me. My footpegs strained, and my legs ached from standing as I kicked the bike into second gear and nursed the front wheel down the slippery rock and leaves on the trail.

The following day promised permanent sunshine, so I took a quick scenic ride up West Mountain, which hovers over Hot Springs. The view from the summit was glorious, gazing at the town below and beyond. The deal I made with the heavens was that I would spend the rest of the day riding in wanderlust in my cockpit, because I had reached the apex of this triangle—or half of my planned loop—the second half of the burn.

 

 

Changing plans

But plans change as quickly as they are made, and I began to ad lib my ride back to Tampa.

I’d always wanted to touch base with Natchez, Miss., and the forlorned Natchez Trace Parkway. So, I decided to cross into Louisiana for the night.

State Route 7 to Camden, Ark., is a motorcyclist’s dream: extremely well surfaced, with long tree-lined straights and body flailing curves and apexes.

I arrived at my campsite on the Mississippi River by nightfall.

Dinner was at Camps Restaurant across the bridge, and my view from the dinner table was priceless, as the steam paddler “American Queen” departed for the night in a full spectrum of colors.

I noticed the next morning that my fellow camper, Gene, was building a rig to help stabilize his kayak from being swamped by barges on the Mississippi. He already had paddled solo down from Boone, Colo., and the Arkansas River on his way to Venice, La., the last community navigable on the Mississippi River Delta.

I took this opportunity to savor both my long-filler cigar and the conversation about his then-250-day journey. He still had 300 days to go.

After our talk, I reluctantly extinguished my cigar and set off to Natchez to start a stint on the manicured, groomed and well-kept Natchez Parkway before turning toward home.

I passed several tobacco stores along my route but never had a desire to sample the goods. I took the road less traveled and looked for tobacco billboards around every bend. But I enjoyed the slow burn of my long-filler the most.

Oliver A. Emberger is an AMA member from Land O’ Lakes, Fla.