Happy. Healthy. Heathen.

Second day on Milford Track, spent the night before in the Clinton Hut…

Again, because it was cool enough, we were able to carry in some pretty delicious food:

We enjoyed an interesting talk by Ranger Ross the night before; after breakfast he came in with a New Zealand possum, or as he said the “troublemaker”.  New Zealand did not have any mammals before they were introduced by settlers.  What they have an abundance of is birds, of whom they are all very proud, and they don’t like the mammal predators (rats, stoats, possums) that eat the birds.  So Ranger Ross was delighted to have caught this one in his trap.

Day 2’s walk was delightful.  It was cool in the morning, warming up to shorts and tees in the afternoon.  Sam tried his hand at fly-fishing a time or two – we could see the beautiful trout in the river, but no luck.  The forest was very canopied, lots of the enormous fern plants; altogether very LOTR movie-feeling.  Green hills around with cascades and waterfalls, bigger snow-capped mountains just behind.  The trail is beautifully maintained and follows the Clinton river most of the day.

We hiked about 10 miles this day, and enjoyed a meal of pasta, chicken, cheese, pesto, and the ubiquitous Peanut M&M’s for dessert.  Ranger Ian was our host here, and the bunks in this hut were all in the same upstairs area.  Hikers were of two varieties:  the 20-25 year old backpacky-kid-college-student, and the 50+year old backpacky-granola-tree-hugging-tramper variety.  The group was split about 50-50, and we enjoyed everyone in our tramp group.

Day 3 takes us up and over McKinnon Pass…more pics to come!

Thanks for reading!

Back in my house in the United States, after having traveled across the date line and through 16 time zones.

What a trip we have just taken!  I hope to convey with words and pictures just how fabulous our adventure was.  I anticipate it will take a couple of entries so check back if I don’t get it all done in one setting!

Readers of this blog will know that we have arranged to take along a number of friends with us on our journeys in the form of Flat Facsimiles:

We made 18 friends, including Aden, for whom Jesse assumed responsibility most of the trip:

We had great luck on our trip to New Zealand – Nashville to Atlanta, Atlanta to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Sydney, Sydney to Queenstown, New Zealand!  Sam and Laura live on the North Island, and took a ferry to the South Island, then drove about 15 hours to meet us in Queenstown.

We spent the next day sightseeing the town, grocery shopping for the hike, driving Mr. Bongo on the WRONG side of the road, looking at Laura and Sam, the usual.

The countryside is just beautiful, and Queenstown is a little ski/tourist town near the Remarkables Mountain Range.  We enjoyed eating in town and shopping for the last few things we needed for the trip.

The next day, we parked the car at the Visitor Center and loaded up for our 4-day, 54 kilometer hike.

Getting to the trailhead involved a bus ride and a boat ride through a beautiful area.

The first day’s walk was only 90 minutes.  This hike, or Track as they are called in New Zealand, is an organized trail to 3 different huts over 4 days, with a group of 34 other hikers.  The huts are bunkhouses, and have a general cooking area with sinks (no hot water), and propane cooktops.  The group consisted of lots of Kiwis, some Aussies, some Germans, 2 other Americans besides us, 2 Brazilians, 2 from Czech Republic, 3 Israelis (more about them later), and 2 Dutch.

Because we had such a short walk the first day, we brought in salmon steaks for dinner, and they were DELICIOUS.  What’s the expression about hunger being the best appetizer?  We were starving, and Laura fixed couscous corn cakes and steamed broccoli too.

So that takes us to the first night, so I’ll conclude this post and start another.

Thanks for reading!

Home again, home again, jiggety jog…

Just wanted to do one last posting for the conclusion of our bike ride.  We’re back home now, back to jobs, home, asphalt, and wanted to wrap up our postings of our Ride 09:  Pittsburgh to DC.

We left our hotel in Georgetown Monday morning with a pretty weak plan:  Ride around town, find mile marker zero on the canal, see the sites at the mall, come up with bike boxes, ride to the airport, fly home.  Notice anything wrong with that plan??  Maybe the “find the bike boxes, ride bikes to airport” part?  How big is a bicycle box?  Remember the pictures from the beginning of the trip?  Coincidentally, you can fit a bicycle into a bike box, so riding with one balanced on one’s bike might not be the best idea…

Jesse spent the morning SHOWERING the bikes in the hotel room shower (true) and Gayle spent the morning, ummm, seeking and finding a Starbucks coffee shop (true).  As a side note, let me just tell you, our bags/dirty laundry REEKED.  We’d even done laundry at the halfway point, but we were still pretty stinky.  Too bad for the people downwind of us, and next to us on the airplane.

We found the historical marker in Georgetown,

and Mile Marker Zero (hint:  it’s very near the Watergate Hotel and the Kennedy Center)

Then we zipped into DC for the obligatory sights:

Then, because, believe it or not, Jesse had never been to Arlington, across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge we went.

By now we’ve called a bike shop or two and struck out finding boxes…why, there’ll be some at the airport we can buy, of course.  So off we go on the Mt. Vernon Bike Trail which leads straight into the Reagan National Airport – kinda cool.

Anyway , in the interest of making a long story longer, no bike boxes at airport.  Get out the handy iPhone, start calling bike shops, find one nearby with boxes, Jesse starts disassembling bikes, Gayle gets taxi to shop, shoves 2 full-size bike boxes into small-size taxi (!), pack up bikes, get on flight to BNA via ATL, fly two legs, drive home, crawl ever so gratefully into bed.

All in all, fabulous trip.  Would we do anything differently?  Minor things:

 if you must start from the Pittsburgh airport, enjoy the Montour trail with all its imperfections.  If you have sag support, or the ability to begin at a different location, lop off those 45 miles and begin in the town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania on the Great Allegany Passage.  That’s a great trip by itself (3 days). 

If you want to, go ahead with the 3 days on the C and O Canal Towpath, but be prepared for lots and lots of mud and harder effort.  If you want just the flavor of the trail, just do the last 60 of the 180 mile trail, starting in Harper’s Ferry, coming into Washington DC, seeing the working lock, the Great Falls, etc.

The Continental Divide cuts the trip in about half, and the smartest of riders would begin at the Divide and go one direction, the get sag support back to the Divide and go the other direction – all downhill!!

Happy Trails!!

Thanks for reading!

We are here.

What a day today was! 

We started out bright and early, mostly because of the extra hour of sleep (!), and as we left Harper’s Ferry and had to cross the Potomac and go down the spiral staircase with the bikes.

We had breakast in a little town, Brunswick, MD, where they were setting up for the Veteran’s Day Parade.  We couldn’t hang around til noon, so off we went.  We got to the Second Breakfast stop,

where we had some delicious fried chicken and Jesse called to check in with work about his schedule for tomorrow.  He’s on reserve, and Delta informed him that he had Long Call (he has 12 hours in which to position himself in Detroit for a trip), so we re-thought our day.  We had another 50 miles to go, and we had planned on humping pretty hard to get to the DC airport for a 7:30pm flight; with the news of the Long Call, we decided to not push so hard, go to about 15 miles or so out of DC, call it a day, and cruise in the remaining miles tomorrow morning.  Good Plan?  We’ll see…

We spent most of the day in swamp-like condition because of yesterday’s rains, so we gave up on maintaining any kind of speed at all, hitting 7 and 8 mph most of the day.  The slower speed allowed for a little more sightseeing, and that was kind of  fun.

 We also made a stop at a ferry landing (where we ate YET again), and took this photo on the side of the building:

Because of the nature of the trail conditions, every now and then you hit a puddle that’s FAR deeper than you think, and you just launch yourself skyward – that’s what had happened here, and my bag went flying – tearing off the little velcro tabs that are supposed to keep that from happening!

So we’re working our plan, riding leisurely, then at about 20-something miles yet to the end, we stop to see one of the lockhouses on display, and we speak with a park ranger.  We ask him about upcoming points of road access to the trail where we might bail and start looking for a hostel, hotel, B and B, whatever.  Mr. Park Ranger Sir tells us that there is ABSOLUTELY no lodging until the trail feeds into the city and the very end.  Not good.  It’s 4:00, no Daylight Savings Time, and we have 20+ miles to go!  We know we can pick up our pace a bit, cuz we’re out of the worst of the mud, but not THAT fast.

This is the last pic we took of the river before we packed it in and put our heads down.

So we ride the last 19 miles as hard and as fast as we could, and even so, it was dark for the last 10 or so.  I don’t mean dusky, sunset-y, having-a-little-trouble-seeing-the-path, I mean full-on headlight/headlamp/red rear blinkie no moonlight frickin D-A-R-K.  We hated to miss getting our big moment coming into the city, but at that point we still have no place to stay, and we really don’t know where the trail feeds in along the Potomac (Georgetown). 

Anyway, all’s well, we’re in the Holiday Inn on Wisconsin (which is at the top of a BIG-ASS hill), showered, Jesse is snoring beside me, I’m watching the Series (Phillies in 6), and our trip has come to an end.  We haven’t checked the flights yet, but we go home sometime tomorrow, after we resolve our bike-box issue (airport?  bike shop?  build our own from cardboard we scavenge?).

We’ve had a great time, and I’ll try to do a follow-up post with what we would change if we did it again, or if someone else wanted to try it.  Thanks for sharing the adventure with us, expecially my Flat posse!

Thanks for reading!

Loooonnngggg Day today…

Started out with a great breakfast at a diner/bakery in the town of Hancock – I got my usual high protein bacon and eggs, Jesse got the most delicious, sticky, sweet, pecan-y rolls EVER.  We bought a whole pan full, ate a few, then wrapped up the rest to take with us. 

We did about 11 miles on the Western Maryland Rail Trail, which paralleled the C and O til we fed back onto the mule towpath.  We were trying to outrun the forecasted (?) rain, and did pretty well.

 The scenery was beautiful again today – we stopped and saw Fort Frederick, a revolutionary war Fort, and we saw a snake cross the path.  We also saw upwards of 50 deer between yesterday and today.

We ate lunch (and fixed Jesse’s leaking tube) in the town of Williamsport at a cute cafe called the Desert Rose.  It wasn’t long after that that it began to rain and the picture-taking was over for the day.

We’re in Harper’s Ferry, WV at a hostel/bed and breakfast on the hill.  We climbed an interesting spiral staircase to cross the river, but it was pouring down rain and we didn’t get the camera out, so if it’s clear tomorrow morning, we take a pic when we cross it again.

Last day tomorrow – 60 miles into DC…thanks for reading!

Another great day on the trails!

We started out in Cumberland, Maryland with a great breakfast at our Fairfield Inn.  Then back up the trail a bit for a picture of the C and O sculpture on the square.  We knew it was going to be a long day, and we were unsure of the trail conditions, so we were rolling by 9, which for us is early.

Today we began the C and O canal (stands for Chesapeake and Ohio).  The canal was conceived in the early 1800’s as a route to carry goods to and from Washington DC.  The railroads were also being developed at the same time and at times they ran parallel to one another.  The canal was built, complete with 75 locks, alongside the Potomac, and was used until 1925.  It was shut down and began to deteriorate and then-President Nixon signed a bill creating the C and O National Park in 1971.  Now many of the locks and lockhouses are visible and some are even functioning for public display, and the trail runs for 180 miles from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington DC.

The trail conditions here were different than the Rails-To-Trails we’ve been on up to now.  It’s far muddier, and more “natural” (read roots, stones, puddles), but it was no less beautiful.  Jesse took a little spill, but the leaves cushioned his fall a bit, and we fully expect this won’t be the last time, as we expect a bit of rain tomorrow, making the trails even juicier.

We ate twice today at colorful places along the trail:  the first, and we took no photos of this for reasons we don’t know, was formerly a high school and there is now a diner in the old lunchroom; the second, Bill’s place, kind of a sketchy place right off the trail that is open when Bill says it’s open.

We also went through the PawPaw Tunnel – a 3000 foot-long tunnel that was to have saved a couple of miles around a mountain when it was built.  A little creepy, drippy, and dark, but interesting.  Took 14 years to build and has a million bricks in its internal arch.

We rolled into the town of Hancock around 6, checked into our cozy hotel, took steaming hot showers, snacked on trail snacks and vending machine soft drinks, and are reading about tomorrow’s ride.

Thanks for reading!

Okay, if you clicked on this link to find out what the hell Butt Butter is, skip to the end of the post.  If you can wait, read on to find out how today’s miles on the Pittsburgh to DC adventure unfolded.

Hump Day, and in this case that’s appropriate in more than one way.

Today began with a 20-mile haul toward the Eastern Continental Divide, which as everyone knows is the geological feature that determines watershed direction; hence, the slow uphill pull we’ve been making since leaving Pittsburgh.  We are following a rail bed, so all the big hills and curves are smoothed out, even in areas where it’s very hilly. 

Along the way we passed a couple of beautiful trestles and a wind farm.

The remaining 26 miles that brought us into our overnight town of Cumberland, Maryland were fabulous.  We could have technically done them without pedalling, but we were enjoying getting the speed up a bit since we’ve been cruising around 10-12 mph.  Jesse’s computer showed 22 as top speed.

We also crossed from Pennsylvania into Maryland at the Mason Dixon Line – trivia question on Facebook photo album.

This little town in Maryland is the start of the C and O canal, and is a very quaint, homey, bike-oriented town.  We went out for Mexican food here, and then stopped at a bike shop on the canal.  We have camera problems (I left the charger at the first night bed and breakfast, and we’re just about out of the last charge), but we hope to resolve that before tomorrow night’s blog/pictures.

Butt Butter:  this is a bike-riding-specific ass lubricant (!) that serves to reduce any area of friction in the saddle.  Our Ragbrai team has long discussions about application technique:  some choose to apply just a tiny amount to the inside chamois of the riding shorts, others of us want to feel as if we are sitting in apple pie as we ride (that would be me).    It’s an indispensable piece of riding paraphernalia, and I am glad to share this information with you.  Now you know.

Thanks for reading