Chugging along the trails....

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Day 48 Washington, PA to Rockwood, PA
Total Miles: 112.4 (3386.2 miles to date)

Today was absolutely amazing. I really need to thank PennDOT for the Rails to Trails program. Today instead of going over many steep and savage mountain we got to ride on a bike trail for about 70 miles along rivers and shaded by trees the whole way. How, you may ask? Well PennDOT and the Parks Department decided to transform a blight on the landscape and make it useful again. There used to be railroads that took coal and lumber from the mountains of Pennsylvania and shipped it to ports and rivers for use around the country. Eventually those industries failed but the rail lines were left behind. This proved very advantageous for us since as well all know, trains can't climb very well. The trails follow the rail grade at about 3% which is very gentle and quite honestly barely noticeable. We made it over many mountains today but we really didn't even notice we were climbing, and we had the trails to ourselves. These trails actually run between Washington D.C. and Pittsburgh, PA without ever getting on a road. They are really cool.
Even though the riding was pretty easy and really enjoyable we began to realize today that PennDOT may have been wrong when they told us that the trail was 332miles long. We had already ridden about 130mi of it by the end of today and were nowhere near halfway across the state. The pace we had planned on was going to have to be replaced by a faster one if we were going to be in the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday June, 25th so that Jess' mom could see us finish before she went on vacation.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a big day and we can get the rest of the climbing over and done with. But who knows how it will go since we usually don't have back to back big days.

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Photos

rail
100 miles of solitude and mellow grades

river
River views all along the way