Day 10 - Into Pennsylvania

A foreward:

Before I begin to recount this, please understand that much of this is remembered three days later due to the intensity and circumstances of the last few days. So the structure and depth may be tonally different than previous postings, but I will try my best to be faithful to my experiences.

A Missing day:

You may notice there is no posting for Day 9. It existed, it certainly happened, but after the previous days wear and tear was mounting and had been for some time. I needed an actual rest day. Day 9 was partially that.

The intention was to travel the 10 miles to Harpers Ferry and tour it, and then simply hop over the river via the rail bridge and shelter in some close by roach motel.

That day had its foibles and minor stories, but I think it fits better into a more broad reflection I’m considering on the nature of historical attractions and the ecosystem of commerce they generate around themselves, and my personal disdain for that.

In short, day 9 felt more like an obligation to summon up content that I did not care to create, and honestly had little interest in finding some sort of story to tell.

And I have to be honest to myself and my purpose here. The conceit of this blog is that it’s my space wholy. I feel some obligation to you as a reader, but I refuse to glamorize. Day 9 was not something worth sharing.

All that’s truly important is that I made a scant amount of miles and ended up across the river in that roach motel.

Day 10 - Finally.

I woke up in that very roach motel feeling like the prior day was a waste. That in actuality sitting in an isolated motel with only a gas station and a liquor store directly adjacent left me bored and ready to move. It was truly only a rest stop for my muscles.

I had deeply pondered the night before about routing and feeling out what I felt was either sensible or possible because I was to hand off searching for some place to stay to my wife, Rebekah, who was willing to call ahead of me to different churches and see if she could summon up any support. I simply provided three different possible locations:

Shippenburg which was my safety “bail out” at around 60 miles, Newville at around 72 miles, and Carlisle at around 85 miles.

My hope was to make it to Carlisle.

The weather at 7am was dreary, wet and in the lower 70s. It was warm enough to not have to wear wet weather or cold weather layers. I would just be riding wet throughout the duration unless it took a cold turn.

The wet weather made me feel sluggish like I was pulling more weight than I had the day before. And the low clouds and fog turned the previously cheerful rolling hills into a landscape of muted tones and grays.

After about 20 miles I hit Hagerstown, Maryland. It’s a fairly larger city and navigating it posed some difficulties. I was sent down confusing coridors full of old brick houses, some in desperate need of rehabilitation, and others which looked untouched by time. If I had time, and honestly the desire I would have taken pictures of these places, but I find myself less and less interested in cities and towns and more interested in traversing the expanses between them. The previous day’s enforced rest set my drive to make miles high, and so in the span of perhaps 20 minutes this largish town was fully behind me and I was back into the fecund countryside.

After twenty five miles the hunger signals started to fire and it was time to find an honest to goodness meal. Today necessitated it because I knew at minimum I was going 60+ miles. Luckily there was a waffle house just a few miles down this exurban stretch of roadway adjacent to the main highway. So I stopped there and ate a large breakfast to fuel my engine. I sat for about thirty minutes to let those calories start to turn into the available reserves of glycogen and free sugars I would need.

It’s hard for me to know what matters anymore when it comes to giving my account of my experience. Over the last few days I’ve started and stopped writing this post multiple times. Sometimes it was internet issues, sometimes it was a deep and foreboding sense of “I have nothing of value to share." Or “Who even cares?”

I spoke with Bekah last night about it and I think the most honest place I came to were two points:

I used to write for my mother in that childlike way of “mom look at what I can do”. Not seeking her approval so much as just kind of a secret love letter of appreciation.

The second realization was that I write for me. If I have the desire to share something it needs to come from within. A real desire to get a thought out without attempted to placate or feed the reader some saccarine account of my experience.

I think this is what has been blocking me from putting anything down for the last few days because I felt some sort of false obligation to do exactly that.

That’s what cast a pall over day 9. I felt like I had some obligation to provide content when all I wanted to do was just lay in bed and watch terrible movies. But this is my tour and my thoughts and my experiences. Projecting some false image of self out into the world for validation is not something I desire. I’m human and sometimes I have deep and transformative realizations brought through this experience that are worth sharing, and sometimes I want to just watch trash TV while eating ice cream.

I don’t mean it rudely, but that just an aspect of this that you will have to deal with. It’s important to me to remain unvarnished because there will absolutely be times in which I’m conveying something that sits right on the edge of being supercillious, or self absorbed, that could feel arrogant or egotistical, but that’s not the intent, and certainly not how I wrote it. I want in those moments when I feel like I’m writing something meaningful for you to know it truly is meaningful, at least to me.

Sometimes making miles is seeing the same things over and over again in a random recombination. Another hilly field set in front of mountains with a silo. All the while in the back of my head I’m repeating a half remembered lyric from a song over and over and over for an hour while my body and brain disconnect. This is not glamorous, it is shockingly mundane after a turn.

Miles and miles of wet roads scrolling by. Each vista not that different from the last. Certainly beautiful in their own ways, but… normal. Spectacularly unspectacular.

If you or I lived here we might appreciate the vibrant shade of green of young wheat, or the how on some days the clouds hug the tops of the low mountains. We might feel the familiar comfort in seeing chickory blooms along the roadside, but as I said before it is often hard to express the beauty of the familiar.

Should I care about a wet cornfield? Is it even worth talking about or stopping to take a picture?

Part of me cares to share the unfamiliar. Part of me wants to showcase a way of life wherever I am at. Another part of me just wants to put my head down and go.

But sometimes you round a bend and you can’t exactly put your finger on why the something strikes you the way that it does, but it causes that momentary pause. It interupts the 687th recital of the one line of that song that’s been stuck in your head for 30 miles.

I can’t explain why this field was more important than any building in Hagerstown, why it merited me stopping, getting off the bike and pulling out my 7lb camera to take a photo in drizzle. It seemed meaningful in the moment, so I did.

There is whatever meaning you choose to make out of it. It’s just a field.

It’s just a wet road.

Mundane glimpses of a fifty five mile stretch through Maryland into Pennsylvania.

Less contemplation more function:

Yeah, fifty five miles over wet but pleasant roads into a small community with a library where I could charge and rest.

I wasn’t particularly tired, but this stop made the most sense for making a short dash towards Shippensburg at worst, or a longer one towards Carlisle.

So I circled the library looking for outlets and identified a few. I went in and asked if it would be ok if I charged and blogged. The two ladies responded affirmatively and so that’s what I did.

After about an hour I went and got something to eat at a local restaurant.

I only intended to get two slices but the server let me know there was a special on personal pizzas. So for $5.99, who am I to say no to cheap calories when I’m already deeply in deficit.

The walk to and from the restaurant made a poignant statement about how hostile our infrastructure in the US is towards anything but travel by car. I felt like walking the dangerous verge of the road was like traversing some alien moonscape.

But at least the weather had finally broken and the rain had given way to a bright and clear afternoon.

At around 3pm I was back on the bike and out onto the roads again.

More miles. More fields. More silos.

Until I rode past a field that looked entirely different. Bursting with deep purple, lavender and near pink flowers. This was Alfalfa.

Grown here as fodder for the Dairy cows as part of their over winter supply. It was a welcome sight that reminded me of the berm of many North Dakota or Montana fields.

I reached Shippensburg with eas at around 66 miles in at nearly 4pm. My path now converged with a part of the CVR — Cumberland Valley Rail Trail. So I was off the pavement and onto crushed gravel again. My top speed was slightly lower but my average speed was higher overall because of the lack of challenging hills.

Newville passed by without a second thought. I knew that the start of the day my real goal was Carlisle at around 85 miles and so I strove onward knowing tonight would be a motel night as no responses could be summoned from the UMC and campgrounds weren’t available.

So at around 6pm I finally made it to the outskirts of Carlisle and started searching for options in the vicinity.

I spotted that on the outskirts of Hagerstown, another 20ish miles down the road there was one offering that was significantly cheaper and so it wasn’t much of a difficult choice. My legs felt good, my battery was reasonably well charged.

So I mounted the bike for one last push. I had told the clerk on the other end I expect to be there no later than 8pm, but honestly would get there much sooner because I knew I would need to let the throttle out. Coming into Carlisle, and the most direct path to the motor was on a two lane highway with an acceptable, but not too large shoulder. Stepping up the speed was the greatest way to increase my safety.

Throughout the day I held a pretty reasonable average pace of 15-17mph. I was now going at 22-24mph, keeping the assist level just low enough so that I was always contributing my maximum human power to the pedals without them spinning out under me and overworking the motor and draining the battery unnecessarily.

This road also put me in the path of my old nemesis: wires from blown out car tires.

Predictably 10 miles into this wild dash the rear wheel started to feel swirmy under me. So I pulled over and pressed down on it. It pancaked some but still had firmness. So I got on again and it was clear the tire was losing pressure.

So I started the arduous process of removing the rear wheel and pulling the tube out to inspect it and the tread of the tire for the cause. I quickly found the leak in the tube and patched it. Then I ran my fingers along the inside of the tire until they caught on something. A thorn about one inch long hand pieced the edge of the tread. So I pulled it out and thoughtfully made sure to do a second inspection. My hand again caught on something. When I looked closely I saw a small shard of shining wire. I was able to pull it out but I wasn’t sure if this had also punctured the tire as it was under my kevlar liner.

The patched tube went back into the tire, the tire onto the rim and I set my pump to pumping. When It was an acceptable pressure I remounted the back wheel and then noticed that one section of the tire bead had not seated in the rim. The floppy nature of fat tires can often cause this on the side away from you unnoticed. It was frustrating because it meant dismounting the wheel again and releasing air until the bead was reset before inflating again.

A ten minute fix had now spanned to a 30 minute delay with the sun starting to get low, but it was accomplished.

Five more miles down the road I felt that sensation again, but when I checked pressure I could see I was only at 10psi where it had been 20. This indicated a slow leak and was ridable. I decided to overpressurize the tire to make the last five miles.

At 7:58pm I pulled into the parking lot of the hotel a puddle of human jello.

One Hundred and One miles. The furthest I have ever biked in one day.

I knew in the morning I would need to address a flat tire, but after a shower, the rest of the pizza and a DQ blizzard I launched myself into the bed and ended day 10.