Pittsburgh etc

(brice writing)

We made it in to Pittsburgh yesterday after our nutritious breakfast. The last 10 miles of the trail lead weave through abandoned steel works, active steelworks, and all kinds of train yards and factories:

After successfully navigating our way through the rubble, we found ourselves at the Great Allegheny Passage’s current end, which is in a random row of strip malls about 8 miles short of downtown Pittsburgh next to a PF Changs’. Most sources of information (including the GAP website) advise calling a cab to get into Pittsburgh at this point, but we had planned out a route that seemed like it ought to work without a high chance of death. We were extra confident because we’d run our directions past Adam, a native PGH’er we met on the trail who confirmed that google’s suggestion to “turn right down the alley behind the wendy’s and then walk your bike up the impossibly steep hill” was in fact the way to go.

After spending way too long in the lowest gears available, (Pittsburgh is seriously steep!) we arrived at Phipps Conservatory, where our friend and host Scott works. We spent a relaxing afternoon walking around the gardens waiting for Scott to finish working (he’s in charge of Integrated Pest Management at Phipps, which means he gets to do fun things like tend ladybugs and ‘good’ parasitic wasps that prey on insects that eat plants. Entomologists have cool jobs), and then a relaxing evening at Scott’s house where we practiced skills such as sitting on the couch while Scott cooked us some awesome veggie sloppy joes and sitting on the couch while Scott brought us wine.

We’ve decided to take two days off as we’re both suffering from some IT band syndrome; basically each of us has one knee that hurts quite a bit from biking so much. We’re RICE’ing heavily during the down time and also will be playing with cleat/saddle adjustments once we move on. Having had IT band issues before, we actually brought a mini foam roller, the primary tool for relaxing IT bands, on the trip. We’ve been using it diligently, but evidently not quite enough.

Otherwise our bodies are holding up pretty well; the last two days of biking have felt pretty easy, ignoring the knee pain, in terms of being on the bike and getting the pedals turned over. Our average speed is up over 11mph and we spent around 6 hours in the saddle the first two days on the GAP without real discomfort. So we feel reasonably confident that we’ll be able to hit 60 miles/day pretty easily once we get out on the paved open road.

If things go as planned we’ll head back out Friday morning for Wheeling WV (our target for this next leg is Bloomington, IN). We’ve had quite a bit of trouble finding a bike route out of PGH to the west that doesn’t cause local cyclists to react with alarm. We need to cross two rivers that are banded by railroads, freeways, and steep hills, and evidently there are no safe bike routes. So unless an undiscovered weakness presents itself, we may actually take a cab out to the outskirts of town in the interests of survival.

Some final thoughts on the first leg of the trip… by mileage, we’re already close to 10% done. We’ve both been too tired to really do any serious reflection so far, I think. Our day has been breaking down camp, riding/eating/riding/eating, setting up camp, and falling asleep, sometimes before sunset. That said, we were incredibly lucky to get to spend that first week with great weather, beautiful scenery, no cars, no routefinding, and very few steep hills. The C&O and GAP are set up to make cycling easy and their existence is remarkable feat of planning and conservation.

There was a weird time machine effect as we rode up the Alleghenies. Spring was in full swing in DC; most trees had close to full foliage by the time we left. But between the more northern latitude and the elevation, by the top of the GAP we were basically back in winter with no leaves and very few trees even budding. Pittsburgh is in full bloom too so we’re back in the present.

A couple of blog notes: there have been requests for GPS coordinates in our posts; I’ll work on figuring out how to add that easily. Also, we’ll include our next destination when possible. Thanks for all the comments as well; we appreciate them even if we can’t always reply.

Here are a handful of pics that we haven’t posted yet. We’ll try to be better about regular photography as energy levels warrant.