Actually NPS has a secret crush on us!

(that last post was by Susan, this one was by Brice, we’ll try to make that clear for those who might care.)

So after Susan disparaged NPS last night, they got up super early this morning and went up the trail installing pump handles on all the pumps 4 days early. We are once again hydrated.

Today we biked 46 miles, just past Harper’s ferry, in about four and a half hours. Despite getting up reasonably early at 8ish, we did not make it out of the campsite until half past ten, so we were somewhat constrained by time despite feeling pretty good. We’re going to work on the morning routine; with 8 panniers there’s a lot of confusion over what needs to go where, whether we’ve both brushed our teeth before the toothbrushes gets put away, etc.

We also made use of our first aid kit for the second day in a row; Susan got scraped by her chainring in a walking loaded bikes down stairs fiasco, and I somehow wound up on my side moving at low speed and got some decent road rash on my arm. Moms, we used plenty of neosporin and will be even more careful tomorrow.

At one water stop we met a gentleman, probably in his 50s who had biked down from Cumberland (140 miles at that point on the trail) with a full suspension mountain bike, a bag with a coleman sleeping bag hanging from the handlebars, and a small backpack. On one hand it shows that you don’t need as much stuff as we have; on the other, it was supposed to rain tonight so he was booking it all the way to DC as he had no rain gear or tarp. He was also low on food as a lot of the stores right on the trail are seasonal and not open yet; we have about a million cliff bars so were able to help out.

It’s supposed to get almost to freezing tonight so we’re tucked away getting the sleeping bags warmed up early; we’ll see if it leads to any earlier of a start tomorrow.

Unfortunately we don’t have any good pics from today. The sun wasn’t out enough to get more than a 20% charge out of our solar charger at lunch and we wanted to save some juice for other uses. Like this wall of text.