I mentioned in the previous blog that cycling offers meditative moments, when the conversation flags and the trail goes straight and flat into the distance. Over the past 157 miles from Pittsburgh to Cumberland MD I’ve had lots of time to think in a way that differs from the long hours spent towing the Airstream across the country.

Those thoughts intensified in the past couple of days. From Ohiopyle to Meyersdale PA the GAP trail begins to climb more noticeably, and for a cyclist loaded with 30 or so pounds of gear it becomes more of a challenge, which leads to a different sort of thinking. No longer just a pleasant jaunt between the trees and the river, there’s gravity’s constant reminder that even when you are surrounded by beauty, life can be hard and sometimes there’s nothing to do about it but just keep pedaling.

We left our rented house in Ohiopyle for a quick breakfast at a local cafe and then saddled up for Day 3 with fog still hanging in the hills. This was the hardest day of the trip, with a constant slight climb for 43 miles.

I have to admit that I struggled to keep up even a moderate pace after the first 20 miles or so. A shallow 1% grade is not much until you ride it constantly for a long distance, and then it becomes humbling. My personal experience was complicated by a digestive disturbance that at first I attributed to my recent gluttony, but later realized was a side effect of too much electrolyte-infused water. I also managed to get stung by a hornet.

Still, those minor misfortunes were balanced by the nice ride. We had sunshine (enough to require a bit of sunscreen), perfect cycling temperatures, scenery, art, and friendly conversation for hours. We were three days into a bicycling trip in the damp northeast and hadn’t encountered a drop of rain, and that is a minor miracle.

Besides, adversity can be inspirational. I’ve been thinking for months about new ideas (for books, new products, caravans, etc) and only in the midst of the toughest ride, at the absolute nadir of my despair, did the mental logjam break and some fascinating new ideas begin to develop.

I also can’t complain about the itinerary and daily mileage, since I planned the trip. I knew that the ride from Ohiopyle to Meyersdale would be the hardest of all, and so I made sure we had compensations in the days to follow.

On the map above we are traveling from right (Pittsburgh) to left (Washington DC). Eastbound means about two days of relentless shallow climbing, followed by a single wonderful day of downhill ease from the Eastern Continental Divide all the way down to Cumberland MD.

But before we could do that, we stopped in Meyersdale at the “gem of the GAP”, the beautifully-restored Levi Deal Mansion. I can recommend a stay here, for the exquisite hospitality, the lovely house and bedrooms, and the breakfast—with a small warning to those who are sensitive to train noises at night, because (like virtually every part of the GAP) freight trains are not far away and they blow their horns a lot.

The one person who had no trouble with all the climbing was Bert, thanks to his fancy Trek e-bike. Normally he ran it in TOUR mode, but if the grade was level he could go to ECO mode, and on the few brief steep sections he could flip the controls to TURBO and blow past us scarcely needing to pedal at all. The real-world range of this bike can be up to 70 miles so there was never a concern that he might run out of juice.

E-bikes have been the source of much consternation in the national parks. Just a few days before we left, the Interior Dept announced a new rule which specifically allows e-bikes on all trails normally open to bicycles. Bert had been concerned he might be hassled on the C&O Canalway (which is part of the national park system) but with the new rule he’s completely in the clear. To be sure, he brought along a printed copy of the official memorandum to park Supervisors.

I haven’t had a chance to talk about things we’ve seen along the ride. We’ve crossed innumerable high bridges over gorges, viaducts, passed through several long and dark tunnels (one over 3,000 feet long), and read dozens of interpretive signs. George Washington slept here, as a young British lieutenant scouting the rivers. There’s a cave that was filled with Pleistocene bones, street art on the underpasses, tons of railroad history, and little towns left over from the golden age of rail travel. I think one of my favorite small things was a simple tourism information shack with a sign “Shout out your home state as you ride by”, so we all had fun yelling “Arizona! Montana! Maine!” to the two high schoolers staffing the booth.

After Meyersdale we had only 8.3 miles of slight grade up to reach the highest point on the ride, the Eastern Continental Divide. Other than our arrival in DC next Saturday, this will undoubtedly be remembered as the most triumphant moment of the trip. From this spot we would get all of our hard-won elevation gains back in a glorious 1-2% downhill grade spread over 24 miles. Finally, for the first time since Pittsburgh, we could actually coast a little bit, and even when pedaling everyone felt like they were riding Bert’s e-bike.
Along the way we passed through two more tunnels and crossed the famous Mason-Dixon Line. I’ve come to realize that everyone has heard of it but few people know what it is. In the years before the Civil War it was a survey line that resolved a long-standing conflict between the Penn and Calvert families. Mason and Dixon were not the landowners, they were the surveyors. For us, it meant we’d crossed into Maryland and left the old North for the South.

Now we are in Cumberland MD, taking a rest day. We reached Mile 0 of the GAP and have found the beginning of the C&O Canal. This is our day for rejuvenation, laundry, bike adjustments, blogs, and phone calls home to our loved ones. It is very civilized here in the hotel with a swimming pool, wifi, breakfast in the lobby, etc. I have gotten very comfortable and my sore legs are grateful for the break.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we begin anew. The C&O will be very different, with much smaller towns, less cell service, fewer eating options, and rougher terrain. I’m a little nervous about the street tires on my touring bike and plan to talk to the local bike shop about swapping in something more appropriate. We’ll all have to review the food we’re carrying as well, since there will be a few times when we have to rely on ourselves for lunch. And the trail may be muddy in many places.

We shall see what happens, and not worry too much about it. We committed to riding to Washington DC and—short of a broken leg—that’s what we will do. It is, as Bert keeps pointing out, the trip of a lifetime. We can do no better than to take it easy, enjoy and smell the flowers, and remind ourselves that whatever happens we are generating memories that we get to take forward with us forever.

I had expected something very different for this summer of Airstream travel, when I first began planning four months on the road. I would sail from event to event around the northeast, solo for the first time, smoothly because of my experience in this sort of travel, and find adventure at every turn.

Instead it has been a summer of personal challenge, although everything has gone well from a logistical and technical viewpoint. Tugged by emotional bonds to those people and things I care about back in Tucson, I’ve found myself compelled to fly home twice. Traveling solo has its benefits, but it also comes with risks. For me, the primary risk has been loneliness driven by a sense that I’ve done all this before and now I’m simply re-tracing old paths without my usual cast of supporting characters.

Between Alumapalooza and shortly before I towed the Airstream down to Virginia for the WBCCI International Rally, I hopped a flight to Tucson, leaving behind the cool and damp northeast for scorching hot and dry Arizona desert. After the rally—which was a nice time filled with old friends and fellow rally-goers who remembered Emma as a toddler—I pulled back up to Vermont and spent a magical 10 days, but the thrill of re-discovery didn’t last and once again I bought a ticket to fly home for two weeks.

In short, I thought I was going for a nice calming walk for the summer but I brought along a terrier on a leash who had his own ideas.

All of these halting starts and unplanned absences from the Airstream threw a wrench in the works of my carefully machined plan for the summer. The culmination of it all was to be an epic bicycle ride from Pittsburgh PA to Washington DC, along the Great Allegheny Pathway (GAP) and the C&O Canal, a total.of 333 miles of cycling. To be ready for this I was supposed to be training all summer on pleasant Vermont bicycle rides, and instead I blew it off in favor of time spent in Tucson.

This might not have been terrible if not for the coincidental virus that struck me the day I landed in Tucson. I spent the next two weeks coughing and it evolved into bronchitis which lasted until just a few days before the schedule bicycle trip. So, with virtually no training and a slight weakness from being sick for two weeks, I launched into this huge ride with three of my dear friends (Bert, Adam, and Susan).

Fortunately they are understanding people and we have been friends for a long time. Readers of this blog and the Tour of America blog will recognize those names as people who have shared many an Airstream adventure. Bert has been contributing to Airstream Life magazine since the very first issue in 2004 (although we did not meet until 2005, in Acadia National Park), and Adam and Susan have been overlapping with me all across the nation since I met them at Airstream Homecoming in 2004.

The logistics of this ride are harder than they would first appear, for an Airstreamer. Normally the Airstream is a significant advantage but in this case the camping options around Pittsburgh are poor and ultimately I chose to stash the Airstream 119 miles north at the camp of my friends JJ & Sandy. They provided me with spectacular courtesy parking inside a pole barn alongside a river with a two point hookup and wifi, several meals, and the sort of open-arms friendliness that one comes to expect from fellow travelers.

On the penultimate day before the official start of the ride, I drove down to Pittsburgh to meet the rest of the gang at a Courtyard Marriott near the airport (Bert had flown in from Montana). The next morning we joined the commuters into Pittsburgh to launch from the very heart of downtown—the Grant Street Transit Center parking garage— and begin cycling from the urban heart of this great rail town into the green woods.

There will be an article in Airstream Life which documents this trip from Bert’s perspective, and I am sure that his fancy Trek e-bike will be the centerpiece. Bert is 79 years old, and while still an excellent cyclist he has wisely chosen to grant himself a concession to age with some electric assistance. The rest of us are all in our late 50s and while we would all like to be pedaling lightly as Bert does, we’re not quite ready to concede yet. So I’m on my trusty Jamis touring bike, and Susan and Adam are riding cross-bikes, all with the old fashioned form of propulsion: two sturdy legs.

We are all burdened with thirty pounds or so of gear, but fortunately not tents ands such. Early on in the planning we decided that we’d make things easier by booking inns and motels along the way instead of camping, as most thru-cyclists seem to do. This makes the trip considerably more expensive but the value was apparent after the first day when we straggled into Bright Morning B&B in West Newton PA and immediately took hot showers and flopped into bed for a rest before dinner.

Each day is filled with small experiences, too many to document here, Cycling all day is partly an opportunity for meditation, as there are always moments when the conversation fades and you are focused only on the pedaling, as anonymous trees flank both sides of the trail and the path stretches onward to the horizon. And then there are moments of excitement: perhaps a crumbling relic of America’s industrial history to explore, a fantastic steel span over a deep gorge, a strangely colored waterfall that tells a sobering tale of sulphuric acid leaching from abandoned coal mines, or an unexpected conversation with a local resident.

As I write this, we are about 80 miles into the trip, about to start the third day of cycling. Each day is different, and cellular service is spotty, so I can’t promise regular updates. Today I am fortunate to have woken before 6 a.m. so that I can type these few words before we meet at 7:30 for breakfast at an Ohiopyle (PA) cafe, and particularly fortunate that the AirBnB house we rented has good wifi. I can guarantee there will be no evening updates to the blog, as sheer exhaustion causes all of us to mentally shut down until after dinner.

I also spend an inordinate amount of time eating. I have not eaten like this in years, but basically if it stops moving for a second, I eat it. It’s the riding. My metabolism still runs high even at this age and I lost a fair bit of weight last year so I’m trying to maintain now. Yesterday I ate a large breakfast at the inn, then two protein bars and about a gallon of electrolyte-infused water during the morning, then I ate my lunch, most of Adam’s French fries, and half of Bert’s lunch, then several more bars before dinner. At dinner I had a fantastic Impossible Burger, then finished Bert’s dinner for him, the remainder of Susan’s chips and guacamole, and then went prowling the town for a chocolate-peanut dessert thing. Later that evening I found a stash of banana nut bread in the refrigerator and guiltlessly snarfed down two pieces of that before bed. This is probably the most fun part of the trip, for me.

From here it’s all going to be great. We have a week to go on the trip and nothing but fun in the distance. The group is getting along great, as we always do, and for all of us this is a trip of a lifetime. Once it is over, I’ll reunite with the Airstream and start towing back to Arizona, and that will end my Airstream travels for a while. My travels started in May and stumbled at several points but things are ending on a high note and I’m satisfied with how it all turned out.

Follow along here if you want to read more about our bicycle trip over the coming week. If you are only interested in Airstream travel I’ll do a little documentation of my final voyage back across the country starting around Sept 17, but be warned that it is going to be a fast trip with no romance. The new romance awaits back at home, and shorter trips around the southwest are going to be the norm.

When I get to New York on my big cross-country trips, I have to revise some expectations. For example, I have to forget what I paid for diesel fuel everywhere else and just grit my teeth at the considerably higher New York prices. But the really interesting change is the state parks. They are more abundant than in most other states and, for an RV traveler, sometimes a bit challenging.

The abundance is the part I like. As I travel through the center of the state along I-90 (NYS Thruway) there is a smorgasbord of great little state parks spread out along my path, and once I reach the Adirondack Park there are numerous smaller Dept of Conservation (DEC) parks tucked into the green woods and alongside lakes.

I’m always tempted to stay at every one that I can squeeze the Airstream into. That would mean spending weeks crossing the state, which would be impractical, so instead I pick one or two each trip through and hope that eventually I’ll have seen them all. So far: Darien Lakes, Letchworth, Hamlin Beach, Cayuga Lake, Delta Lake, Verona Beach, Fish Creek Pond, Mills-Norrie, Thompsons Lake, Watkins Glen, Point Comfort, and Eagle Point. There are dozens more, although many in the Adirondack region are tent-only.

The trick with many of these parks, especially upstate, is that they are old-school and hence have narrow roads and tight access for longer rigs. Verona Beach was a good example. I had to make an impossible 90-degree turn into the campsite from a single-lane road. If trees had been closer to the road there would be no way to get the Airstream in that site, but fortunately there was enough open grass that I could cut the corner.

Getting into a site like that is always a bit stressful but also gratifying once parked. “Ah,” I can say to myself, “Stand and tremble in awe at my magnificent Airstream backing skills!” It’s even better when there are onlookers who were wondering if the trailer would jackknife or hit a stump. The key is to completely ignore them as you are parking, and then step out of the truck with a bit of a swagger, so that all of the weekend campers can marvel at the skills of a full-time Airstreamer. At least, that’s what I tell myself is happening whenever I survive one of those episodes.

But even the skills honed by camping in literally hundreds of different campsites can still be tested. On the next night I decided to try Eagle Point Campground in Pottersville NY. This DEC campground is perched atop a rise above Schroon Lake, and it is a lovely place that clearly was designed with tenters in mind, not 30-foot Airstream trailers. Most of the sites are un-level, irregularly shaped, and have impossible approach angles for anything larger than a pop-up trailer. Merely towing through the campground was an interesting test of skill to avoid the trees and rocks that lurked at every squiggle along the way.

There are a few spots designated for 30 and even 40 foot rigs but I think that is more of a theory than a guarantee. I took site #16, which can sort of be accessed as a pull-through by much shorter trailers, but for a 30-footer there’s no way. Once I had the Airstream pulled in enough to clear the very narrow road and a big tree, the car was trapped by a fence and another tree. Even squeezing forward as far as possible, the back of the Airstream was less than a foot from the root-strewn single-lane trail (I have trouble calling it a “road”). Thus I could not unhitch without the aid of a helicopter.

But I got it in, and it looked like a good possibility that I’d be able to get it back out in the morning as long as I was very careful, so I dug out every leveling block I had and made a pair of mountains to raise the right side of the trailer to approximately level. In this case, “approximately” means that full glasses of water would not spontaneously slide off the counter, but in all other respects it was going to be a rather slanted night.

Ah, but so worth it. It is worth the risk (or a detour) to me in order to mingle with beauty for a night and wake up inspired for future adventures—although it would have been better if I was able to stay for more than one night.

From that stay to my final destination in Vermont was a short and uneventful trip through stunningly beautiful countryside. I’ve driven these roads many times before but when the Vermont summer is peaking there’s no beating it: vistas of gorgeous Adirondack and Green Mountains, deep blue Lake Champlain dotted with sailboats, fields mowed or planted, farm stands open … the air itself seems to carry a hint of a marvelous & active summer developing.

I’ll be in Vermont for five weeks, until it’s time to go to the International Rally in Virginia. It’s time for boat rides and bike rides, hiking and wakeboarding, creemees, cookouts, concerts on the grass, fireworks and farmer’s markets. Summer has begun!