the hills of pennsylvania

From the very first day of this trip, I've heard about the hills of Pennsylvania. At orientation, the trip leaders talked about how the Rockies would be nothing compared to the hills of Pennsylvania. Although the Rockies are higher, the hills of Pennsylvania are far steeper. We were told that there were hills so steep in Pennsylvania, we could get to going over 60 miles per hour going down them. One reason the trip was organized so that we ride from west to east is that we wouldn't be strong enough to ride up them at the beginning of the trip. Bernie, one of the riders -- and one of the stronger riders at that -- is from Pennsylvania and told harrowing tails of the hills of Pennsylvania.

I've gotten myself so worked up about these hills of Pennsylvania that I have literally had dreams about them. I've convinced myself of two things: 1) I will not be able to bicycle up the hills, and will end up on the side of the road walking my bicycle up the hills, if not crawling. 2) If I do manage to make it successfully over the hills of Pennsylvania, I'd certainly be able to fly straight to the moon.

Today was my first real experience with the hills of Pennsylvania. And while the morning was a pretty tough ride -- and it was quite hilly as anticipated, with the steepest hill having a grade of 17% -- I think I'd built it all up so much that bicycling straight up a vertical wall would have been easier than the task of bicycling the hills of Pennsylvania as I'd imagined it.

We also bicycled through the Mingo Creek County Park and then entered the Youghiogheny River Trail, a railway turned into a dirt trail, that we stayed on the rest of the day. It's part of the Great Allegheny Passage, 350 mile trail between Pittsburgh, PA and Washington D.C. The trail is a "rails to trails" project, where a disused railway was converted into a trail of crushed limestone. As trains cannot go up steep hills, the grade is less than 1% at all times -- so even though we were going uphill all day, it was never very steep. Praise the Lord for trains! When we began on the trail, the ground we were riding on was just higher than the river. As we continued throughout the day, under the tree-provided canopies, we continually climbed until eventually we were high above the Youghogheny River and it looked like a slim line below.

I rode with Geena and Caitlin for most of the morning, and it was so relaxing to not have to worry about cars and traffic on the trail. For once, we were the only vehicles on the road! A Big Ride alumni, Fred Husak, very kindly provided lunch for us all. He and his family brought out Subway sandwiches (James Lynn, a sweet little man who has developed somewhat of a celebrity status on the trip and who I've never seen pass up the opportunity to stop at a Subway ("You always know what you're going to get"), was beside himself), fruit, cookies, and chips. I wanted to get into town early to find a printer to print some papers for my visa, so I took off before the others, and was trying to make good time to get into town before the library closed. Try as I may, it was hard to get much above 15 m.p.h. on the relatively softer surface of the trail.

On the opposite side of the river, a train line is still in use. On several occasions, I found myself riding along parallel to a train on the opposite bank, looking down up the distant Youghiogheny River, earthy smells rising up from the dark ground, and a leafy canopy of green keeping me safe from the sun. Life just seemed right.

I made it to town in time to grab the necessary papers from my luggage and jet over to the library before four. I was confident it would still be open. And had it been a day of the week the library is open, I would have been fine. But I arrived at the library to find it was closed on Mondays. FAILURE. I headed into town, feeling defeated, but found a bicycle shop, Confluence Cyclery, where the very kind owners let me use their computer and printer for free. I'm now one step closer to completing this miserable application! However, there was no Fedex / UPS in town, and the post office was closed, so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to mail it in to the UK Embassy in New York.

Confluence was a teensy little town, and I found out at the bicycle shop that most restaurants are closed on Mondays. I picked up some chocolate milk and blueberries from the local grocery store, Diamond Produce, and headed back to our campsite, Suder's campgrounds, on the edge of town. After convincing Bestie to throw some of my clothes in to her laundry when she went in town to the laundromat (in exchange for some of my blueberries... she has a weakness for blueberries), setting up camp, and showering off, I went to eat at the nearby Lucky Dog Cafe with several others. It's amazing how close we've all grown through the trip. At the beginning, mealtime conversation was polite, tentative, and awkward. At dinner tonight, we couldn't stop laughing. I am really going to miss this.