We’re still alive!
(this is Brice writing – post was written last night/posted Saturday. Note that we won’t have cell service for decent stretches so a lack of posts doesn’t mean we were eaten by a bear. )
Another two days have flown by; though not much of note has happened we’ve been kept pretty busy on our bikes. Thursday we got a very slightly earlier start (10:15) and then we met Susan’s coworker Karen for lunch in Shepardstown WV, just over the Potomac from the C&O trail. Accessing the bridge requires climbing out of the valley, so we were plenty hungry for some giant burritos. Later in the day, we hit a 6 mile detour around a washed up section of the canal. The detour is 6 miles over rolling farmland (emphasis on the rolling) – we definitely aren’t ready to tackle hills in bulk yet. We called it a day after 44 miles, roughly 84 miles short of Cumberland, MD (the end of the C&O) and the beginning of the Great Allegheny Passage.
We had great plans last night and this morning of getting through those 84 miles today (and grabbing a motel/shower in Cumberland) but it was not to be. Despite setting an alarm and hitting the trail at 9, when we’d only made 30 miles 4 hours later, we amended our plans. So here we are, camping one more night after 53 very tired miles – I think we’re still feeling the hills from yesterday.
One problem with our routine we’ve identified is breakfast – we’re having oatmeal and coffee and maybe a couple handfuls of gorp before heading out and it just isn’t sticking – we wind up stopping after 5 miles to inhale more gorp and whatever else we can lay hand to. So if anybody has good ideas for breakfast items that are compact, shelf stable, high calorie and most importantly tasty, leave us a comment.
Tomorrow we’ll roll the last 30 miles into Cumberland and take the rest of the day off before tackling the GAP Sunday. Finally, some pictures:
1: Awesome iron-y/iodine-y water from the pumps along the trail. Tastes great!
2: Changing flat 1 of many
3: Pretty flowers
4: Susan knows a cool trick to keep gnats away from your face; if you hold your hand up they’ll swarm up higher. Unfortunately there’s a limit to how long one can hold one’s hand up. At least gnats don’t sting/bite.
5: the view from our tent tonight. I’ve never been anywhere else that encourages camping 5 feet from a river. On the other hand, gray camping water is probably the nicest thing anybody ever dumps in the Potomac.
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.
The NPS’s personal vendetta against us
Campsite tonight: at Swains Lock, C&O Canal Park mile marker 16.6
Miles biked: ~22
Bananas eaten: 3
Times fallen over despite Susan never having ridden with front panniers before: 0!
Sets of stairs descended with fully loaded bikes: 3 (detour in the trail)
Number of working water pumps in the entire Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park: 0, until April 15
A gorgeous afternoon of biking and a magnificently situated campsite were great ways to start our trip, however, they were somewhat spoiled by the realization that there is no water available at any of the campsites in the whole 180-so miles of the park until after we’ll have already left it, because apparently they just haven’t been turned on yet for the season. I’m not sure why the National Park Service is trying to throw a wrench in our plans, but it is certainly not very nice. Fortunately, there’s a lot of little towns, businesses, and etc all along the canal where we can beg or buy water for the duration. In the meantime, here’s a few pics:
1. Along the canal
2. Susan
3. View of the Potomac from our campsite
4. Ditto
5. A present from our friends Amy and Nathan that we carried with us in an envelope to open today. What a sweet idea!!!
We’re off!
We’re off!
We brought our two Jamises into Proteus Bikes last Tuesday for a tune-up and general check-over for “anything that might kill us” after we set off. Right off, Anthony, the bike mechanic that took them in, noticed wear on Brice’s chain and cassette that meant both of those needed to be replaced. He was nice as to squeeze in work on both bikes into his busy schedule so they’d be done on Saturday afternoon and we’d be able to embark as scheduled on Sunday. But just now he called and told us of another problem he noticed that potentially would fit into the second of the two categories above — i.e., things that might kill us. Turns out Brice’s front fork is bent — probably from when he crashed and launched over the handlebars last time we rode the C&O Canal trail, in 2010. “Normally, I’d say that wouldn’t need to be replaced right away,” Anthony told me, “but with the kind of load you’re going to be putting on the bike, it could compromise its structural integrity.”
Proteus doesn’t have any replacement forks in stock now but one will come in by Tuesday morning. The first campsite on the C&O isn’t far up the trail, so if Anthony is able to get it installed nice and quickly when it arrives, we might be able to head out on Tuesday afternoon.
The first 42 miles
Brice and Susan, starting our journey by dipping our rear bike wheels in the Atlantic Ocean (in Selby-on-the-Bay, Maryland). And we did in fact stay off the wetland grasses.
Today we started out our bike trip, somewhat symbolically, by biking from the Chesapeake Bay to our house in Silver Spring, MD. (Our goal is to bike from ocean to ocean.) If we were taking route 50 and the Beltway it would have been quite a bit shorter, but on bikes we went a total of 42 miles, according to Brice’s odometer.
We went with two of our bike-enthusiast friends, Brian and Abby (aka Lazerface and The Rock), who drove us and all of our bikes out to the Bay to start our day.
The parking lot in the park we started off from held an osprey nest on the platform alongside a light for the baseball field. When we arrived back at the end of the day with our car to get Brian and Abby's, we spotted Momma Osprey landing back in the nest and feeding her babies. Pretty awesome.
"Me putting on my sleeves is not very exciting."
We rode from Selby-on-the-Bay through Davidsonville, whose gorgeous pastures included one housing llamas, much to Brice’s excitement, and into Bowie. Continuing on into Lanham-Seabrook, we met a man in the tunnels going underneath the train station there who was sitting on a running riding lawn mower and smoking a cigarette, for reasons that were not clarified. Going through New Carrollton we turned into Greenbelt Park, whose intimidating hills were made rather deadly by the fact that we’d already gone 28 miles by then. Surviving, we continued on through Berwyn Heights and then into the University of Maryland, where I got to relive the old days by using a bathroom in the good old Plant Sciences Bldg. We then went through Brian and Abby’s neighborhood, through Langley Park, and then up Sligo Creek Trail, passing just 3 blocks from my old apartment in Long Branch. Two more brutal climbs faced our burning thigh muscles through downtown Silver Spring, past my old office, and onward to our house, which is located at the top of a final hill that was really just insulting at that point.
We had lunch along a stretch of the Baltimore, Washington, and Annapolis Trail, which we rode along for a couple miles. The best part was the Snickers bar that Brian and Abby shared with us.
The weather was utterly ideal. Our plan had been to go last week, but it was rainy all weekend and threatened thunderstorms. Today there was a 20% chance of rain but all the clouds burned off and it was cool and bright.
After riding back to pick up the car, we had dinner at an Irish place we biked past in Davidsonville. A great way to end a successful first ride! Sláinte!
Need reading suggestions
One of our favorite things to do when traveling is to read books that are set in the places we’ll be visiting and that typify some aspect of the local culture or history — in Peru, we read The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Death in the Andes; in Portugal, we read the collected poems of Fernando Pessoa and Requiem: A Hallucination. We’d like to do the same while we bike. We’ll be traveling slowly enough that it shouldn’t be a problem to get through at least one book per state. Brice will have his iPhone with Kindle app and I will have Brice’s old iPhone to use as a Kindle, so we don’t have to lug any heavy books around.
Do you have any suggestions? Here’s a list of the places we’ll be traveling through. Novels (especially historical fiction) and engaging non-fiction are both welcomed. And maybe poetry, too, if it’s place-specific.
- Maryland (specifically, along the C&O Canal up the western edge of the state)
- Pennsylvania (from Cumberland, Md. to Pittsburgh and then west)
- Ohio
- Indiana (we’ll be heading through Bloomington)
- Illinois (we’ll be coming in towards Urbana/Champaign and then north into the western suburbs, and then shoot west toward Davenport, Iowa)
- Iowa (just the northwest part of the state)
- Minnesota (swinging through the Twin Cities and then angling west)
- the Dakotas (there’s some serious nastiness on the roads in North Dakota because of all the fracking activity, and so we are not sure how we will go through this state or if we will swing through South Dakota to avoid it)
- Montana (hitting up Helena in the west, but not sure about everything else in the state yet)
- Idaho (the northern part of the state)
- Washington, ending in the Sound — and yes, I’ve already read The Living, so hold that thought.
Thanks for your suggestions!
Cool gear – episode I
Brice installing an odometer on his bike. The odometer is kind of a nifty gadget. One part, that includes a coil, attaches to the front fork, and a little magnet hooks to one of the front spokes. You tell the computer the diameter of your bike wheel, and, with the magic of physics, the computer senses how frequently the magnet passes by the coil and voila! Your speed and distance. 
OK, for real we’re doing some training now
Brice is putting something or other on the bikes right now and then we’re going on a little training ride. When people hear about our trip, they always say,
“Wow, you must be training a lot to get ready for that.”
“Um, no, actually, not at all.”
“Wait. What?”
And so it pretty much goes. The thing is, when you’re biking for 3 months straight, with no particular hard schedule to keep, the ride itself is its own training. If we take the first couple weeks pretty slowly — only 20 or 40 or so miles a day — we’ll get ourselves into it pretty nicely.
I think to some extent we feel a little guilty about that or something? Also maybe it’ll be nice to get some baseline level of cardiovascular not-dying-ness and butt callouses going. So we’ll see if we can manage a ride to Bethesda and back each day (for the record that’s about 6 miles total — yeah, pretty minimal, considering the 4,000-mile ride ahead of us). We’re not total couch potatoes as it is — we walk a couple miles a day — but we’d hardly be called athletes.
Don’t give me that raised eyebrow — this’ll be awesome!
Susan and Brice's Bike Blog 