After flying into DC a couple of days early and spending two great days as a guest of Matt and his roommate Juan, just over near Capitol Hill, here I am on Saturday afternoon about 4:30 pm having checked into the hotel and registered with the tour company. My bike is waiting for me on the truck and tomorrow morning will be out along with everyone else’s, waiting to take me on this 335 mile adventure, up from Washington, DC, through the Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania countryside to Pittsburgh, PA. I am anxious and excited. Have I trained properly? What kind of people will be on this tour? Am I really going to camp out every night? Do I have the right gear? Well, starting tomorrow morning, I’d begin to get the answers to all those questions.
At 6:00, having repacked my gear twice, I went downstairs to the conference room, which had been turned into a dining room and conference room for the evening. My first impression of everyone was, well, mixed. I think about 12 or 13 ladies, the rest men, about 32 or so. Tall, short, stout, thin, wiry, old, older and ancient, younger, quiet, less so and more so, all in all, a mix of neighbors from any neighborhood in the good old US of A. Did I mention all white? Well, almost any neighborhood….
We found places at various tables around the room, got our dinner – a first glimpse of the quantity and quality of our food for the next week. Lots of food and remarkably good, given it was prepared for about 50 people. I sat down next to a fellow, introduce myself, ‘Hi, I’m Bob” and proceeded to eat the entire meal silently. Apparently new guy didn’t like to talk, or at least talk while eating. This guy was either a very shy person, very private or very disturbed. It was later in the tour that I’d get the answer to that question.
Then it was time for introductions; Larry Brock our Tour Director and Larry 2, Chris, Arlen and Anne and her husband, our staff for this trip. Between them, I’d reckon they’d made this trip over 30 times. We were in good hands! Then our turn to stand up, introduce ourselves by name and say a few words about ourselves. I mumbled something I thought cute – not - and tried to see if I could really know something about each participant by what they said. Impossible to remember all that was said, and truth be known, that experience reaffirmed for me the old adage, you can’t tell a book by its cover. From first my first look and impression of this gang of riders, I was to subsequently find out so much more about my trail mates that I came to realize my first impressions were so wrong. Larry went on to give us a preview of the days to come, some safety tips and that tomorrow, our first day on the trail would be 59 miles, rain forecast in the morning, with a stop at the Lincoln Memorial for a group picture. Jeeez, can I do that?
He then went on to explain about a couple of things I seem to have missed in all the literature about this ride sent to me by the Adventure Cycling Association. Larry explained that the reddish 3 leaf ground cover so prevalent along this path was poison oak and we should be careful not to wander off the path as we explored along the way. He ALSO mentioned the snakes and bears. Yes, snakes and bears. Copperhead and Mountain rattle snakes abound out here in the Mid-Atlantic States and as if we needed to be told, should be avoided at all costs. It seems they lay out on the pathway sunning themselves in the early morning and late summer sun. It follows that they don’t like to be threatened or run over by errant bikers, so riding with an eye out for a rattlesnake sunning itself is proper bike safety.
However, in our caution to avoid snakes, we should not overlook the occasional black bear who also hangs out here in this part of the world. Holy crap. It’s not enough we are riding 50 something miles a day, sometimes in the rain, we have to be careful when we go off the trail to pee not to do so in the poison ivy and when getting back on the bikes, be careful not to step on a rattle snake and finally, as if that’s not enough, be careful not to piss off a black bear in whose territory we’ll be camping in every night.
And finally, were that really, really not enough, he strongly recommended watching out for oil, wet leaves, loose gravel, railroad crossings and foolish cyclists stopped in the roadway. I wonder if the foolish cyclists he referred to were the occasional person, making their way into the underbrush just to relieve themselves while looking out for poison oak, snakes, bears and whatnot. We have met the enemy, and he is us!
Wonderful!
With that, we all went up to our rooms for the last night of sleep on a bed for the next 7 nights, each to imagine the day ahead and try to get some sleep.
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