Day 2. Sunday, Sept. 26th Washington DC to Brunswick, MD. 59 miles.

This day, we’ll ride on the C&O Canal Towpath following the Potomac River to the town of Brunswick.  On the way, we’ll pass the Great Falls National Park (http://www.nps.gov/grfa/).  Later we’ll ride by White’s Ferry, the only working ferry on the canal and shortly pass over the Monocacy Aqueduct, one of the most impressive structures on the entire trip.

A few words here about the C&O Canal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_Canal)

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal, and occasionally referred to as the "Grand Old Ditch," operated from 1831 until 1924 parallel to the Potomac River in Maryland from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, D.C. The total length of the canal is about 184.5 miles (300 km). The elevation change, start to finish, of 605 ft (185 m) was accommodated with 74 canal locks. To enable the canal to cross relatively small streams, over 150 culverts were built. The crossing of major streams required the construction of 11 aqueducts (10 of which remain). The canal also extends through the 3118 ft (950 m) Paw Paw Tunnel. The principal cargo was coal from the Allegheny Mountains. The canal way is now maintained as a park, with a linear trail following the old towpath, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park.




All I need is my rain gear and I'm ready
Click on any image to make it larger.

 

Unloading our gear at the start

Our day started out with a drip.  As in rain. Swell!  We gathered out behind the hotel, getting our bikes set up, and our rain gear on and like ducks behind their mother – in this case, father – we set off on our first day of riding. Riding behind Arlington National Cemetery, as a group we crossed the Potomac River along the Capital Bike trail for a couple miles until we came to the Lincoln Memorial, where we all got off the bikes for a group picture.  The guy in the far lower left with the white hat on is me.  Wow, does this rain gear on over bike clothes make me look heavy, or is it just me…

And then, pointed generally northwest, we came to the C&O Canal Towpath trail and were off on our own to our first stop, about 56 miles away.  A word about me.  In sports, I am generally a loner.  Team sports were always fun, but tennis, running, biking were more so.  Because I got to do it my way. No committees to decide details. No meetings, no consensus.  Just me.  So a bike ride with a group is ok, but more generally alone is more so.  When we got to the Canal and could take off on our own, I was my happiest.  Of course, 44 riders of yet undetermined skill was still a group, but soon that would sort itself out and we would all be off on our own pace, needing only to reach our destination in time for dinner at 6:00.

The good news is that for the better part of 59 miles, the beautiful and wide Potomac River was just on our left sides and the canal, lock by lock, (30 that day) was just on our right.  Some of these sections of canal were full of water, and some not.  Today, trees line the edge of the towpath where at one time, none existed to obstruct the mules as they pulled each of the canal barges up and down the canal.  The towpath today is stunningly beautiful, most of the time a shaded pathway under a canopy of trees which offer shade from the hot summer sun, or in our case, some shelter from the light rain that fell that first morning.  The pathway itself is a combination of crushed rock and dirt, compacted by the numbers of riders, baked by the sun and hardened by the rainfall that dries the dirt pavement hard.

Along the way, each day, the staff set up rest stops to provide us with water, energy bars, fruit, crackers and candy.  It was a relief to see those guys and the rest stop offered us all an opportunity to get off the bike for a minute, replenish our water supplies and grab an energy source.

And so it went, the river on one side, the canal on the other, under a shaded bikeway, the surface made of almost smooth crushed rock and dirt.  There was always something beautiful or historical to see and the miles, as they flew by mile after mile, added up to that magic number of 59 when we each, in our own time rode into The Brunswick Family Campground (http://www.brunswickmd.gov/campground.htm)  for our first night on the trail.

A word here about our nightly routine.  It was almost always identical so I won’t mention it again except when it changed a couple of times.  We’d ride into the campground and park our bikes over by the location picked where they would be under cover for the night and where, if they needed repairs, they got them.  We’d pick up our gear, many of us would grab a beer out of the cooler, and we’d make our way to a campsite we’d pick out, put up our tent and head off for the shower.  Oh, those showers.  Never enough hot water and never enough water pressure, but God Bless what we had, for at the end of a 45-50+ mile bike day, it was heaven.  Slowly then, folks would make their way back to the area where dinner was to be served.  All meals were better than good, with a varied menu and plenty of it.  Never left the table hungry or grousing about the quality of the food. 

We’d then usually have a speaker who would talk about that day’s ride, or tomorrow’s, the historical significance of the area where we rode, the current state of the National Park or the condition of the trail.  Larry would either begin or end the evening meeting with housekeeping information, just the do’s and don’ts of trail etiquette, information from past rides or things to look out for.  A few diehards would stay up past 9:00 but by 9:30 or 10:00, everyone was sound asleep.  And so went day 2.



I'm the guy on the lower left in yellow.
Click on any image to make it larger.



The Potomac, upriver from DC about 20 miles





This was our trail. Everyday. Beautiful.



Our campsite, Brunswick,MD. The Pavillion with tents surrounding.
Click on any image to make it larger



Day 1, Saturday, September 25th. The Virginian Suites Hotel, Arlington, VA

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.

It was 5:00 am...

It was 5:00 am; I was struggling to get out of my sleeping bag and to get up off the concrete floor.  “Where the hell am I, and who are all these old guys moaning and groaning,” I thought?  Slowly, several things came to mind.  I am one of the old guys, about 15 of us had spent the night in sleeping bags on the concrete floor of the basement of the campground owner’s house, I had to pee really, really bad and I ached from head to toe.  And the day before, I had, along with these guys and about 30 other folks, ridden in a hard rain 22 miles up the side of a 2390’ hill, crossed the Mason Dixon line and crossed through the Eastern Great Continental Divide and ridden 23 more miles down to a little town, Rockwood, PA, where I was now struggling to get out of that sleeping bag.  Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?  A couple of months ago, when I signed up for this, it seemed like a really good idea.  This morning, not so sure…

Looking around, I marveled at the collection of guys stretched out in their sleeping bags, or just moving like me, unwinding legs and arms after a long night on a concrete floor.  Tall guys, fat guys, wiry guys, average guys, old guys and older guys.  And the noises.  I never heard so many noises coming out of a group of men in my life.  Stretching, moaning, sneezes, farts, burps, groans, coughs and noises I couldn’t begin to define the origin of.  All we needed was a piccolo, a trombone and some fruitcake strutting around with a baton and we’d have a band the likes of which John Phillip Souza would be proud.

How could this group of collectables, along with the other 30 or so men and women camped out around the campground possibly have the physical will and capability to ride up that mountain in the rain yesterday?  Hell, even without the rain?  But they did.  All 43 of us rode up that hill and lived, although some in various states of pain, to ride another day.  And we had two and a half last days to go.

I get ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to the beginning, where it all started and see if I can put some sense to it all.

It had been a couple of years since the last time I went off on one of these journeys and again, family and friends ask my "Why".  Unlike "Bob's River Ride" where I really had only a little idea of why, this time I knew exactly why.  It's all about fitness, adventure and perhaps, closure.

This ride was to take me from Washington, DC to Pittsburgh, PA, approximately 335 miles along two trails, The C&O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage, both important in the early formation of our country and later important in the great struggle to hold the new country together - the civil war.  It also would take me close to the roots of my maternal family's home and history, my mother's parents, my grandparents, who were instrumental in raising me as a boy growing up in Los Angeles.  They moved to Hollywood, from Uniontown, PA in the early 20's and built the home in which I was raised.

A wise friend also suggested this ride might also be about closure. Perhaps a trip to complete the one I rode a couple of years ago, falling short of my goal of a ride from Muscatine, IA, to New Orleans.  Although I did not go the entire distance, I did, for sure, accomplish a great deal in terms of distance, difficulty, people met and places seen. So perhaps this is also a way of completing the first trip, even though a different route and manner of traveling. 

From a historical point of view, and from a very personal point of view, this adventure was exciting to anticipate and I was sure, would be exciting to execute.

Training for this ride started way back in November, and was accelerated once good weather came to Chicagoland - that would be once the snow melted - and has progressed to the point that I could comfortably ride 50 miles a day for the 7 days required for this trip.

There are my family and a close group of friends who could just shake their heads and roll their eyes at all this.  “An intelligent adult his age should probably not be off on these adventures”, was I'm sure, what was foremost on their minds.  However, they all smiled, encouraged, asked questions and expressed support for my trip.  Thank you one and all.  Your support is greatly appreciated.

Unlike bobsriverride, where I rode for the 700 miles alone, i.e., “Unsupported”, this is a "Supported" tour, with 44 riders and a support staff of 7 from all over the USA participating.  The tour is led by experienced leaders and riders, tour guides and caterers all under the umbrella of Adventure Cycling Association, a wonderful bike-oriented lobbying group, tour operator and resource center for all things, bike touring.  The idea that I am not riding alone on back roads through strange territory allows for family and friends to breathe easier about all of this although I suspect some of the family still faintly hears the theme song, "Dueling Banjos" in their minds. Yikes!

My bike left for Washington DC, the starting point, 7 days before I was due there.  It was like saying goodbye to an old friend as I watched it truck away.  I was excited, a little intimidated and ready for whatever would come.

I had great faith, however, that it would all be great fun.