I'm home now and thinking about all we did over the past four days. We packed a lot in this trip and I'm glad I took an extra day off work to recover. The trip was better and different than I expected. The trail was as nice and scenic as advertised what surprised me was all the sights around and outside the trail. This trail is through some of the more depressed area's of Pennsylvania. The lost of the steel and coal industry that sustained this area for over 100 years is still very much affecting this area. The amount of abandon and rotting plants and empty fields is epic. On the first day of ride besides all the empty factories we saw a lot of coal and coke ash around the trail as well as a lot of run down and abandon houses. However even with all the issues this area has, the people were really friendly. Some of the rest stops along the way had volunteer greeters that would answer any question about the trail like how far to the next stop or the best place to find food. Then there was the work that the people in these town mush have to do to keep this trail in shape. I mean the surface was PERFECT. There were no holes, ruts, soft spots or even debris on the trail. A road bike with wide tires won't have a problem with any part of this trail.
Then there were the bathrooms which were always clean even the port-o-johns. There was one that Jack stepped into and the bottom broke but is was clean and I'm sure it has been replace by now. There were also a lot of displays and small museums along the way that were worth stopping for. That made the ride take longer but also broke it up and made it more interesting.
There is also art scattered around the trail. It usually has some pieces of bike in the art. It was impressive to me that as depressed as this area is that they still have energy, ingenuity and funds to not only maintain this trail but make it one of the best in the country.
This trail mostly follows the rivers in this area and unlike the Lehigh Valley trail you almost always had a good view of the river.
One of the coolest parts of doing this trail was going over all the bridges and through the tunnels. I lost count of how many train bridges we went over. It have to be in the 15 to 20 range. They were all pretty high and had good views of the valley and rivers below
However the tunnels were even better than the bridges. I don't think there is anywhere else where you are going to go through tunnels this long. On the way home we actually stopped off at the Paw Paw tunnel which is on the C&O trail. This is the continuation of from the end GAP trail that goes along the canal from Cumberland all the way to Washington DC.
The tunnel is a kilometer long. We drove to the campground near the tunnel and ended up doing a 3 mile hike to and through the tunnel. At a kilometer long it gets pretty dark when you get to the middle.
You definitely need a flashlight to make your way through. The picture above it what it looked like when I turned my flashlight off.
One thing that did make this trip more difficult to plan was that we road point to point and would always end up 30 to 50 miles from where we parked our car in the morning. I worked out the logistics before hand so that we would always have a car at the end to go pick up the one we drove to the start. This took a lot of thought because we had to get 4 bikes and 4 people in one car to either get to the starting point or back from the ending point. Luckily Jack's van can hold a lot of bikes and people. It also helped that Bob had a roof rack that can fit any car. This meant that I we could put his roof rack on my Baja and get 3 bikes in the back and one on the roof and 4 people in the car. Although we made some minor tweaks to my original logistics plan it ended up not being too much a pain in the ass to go back and get the car we left at that start. I would always try to get dinner or see some sight like Bike Heaven along the way. The only thing issue was the extra time each day it took to drive back to the starting point after the ride which made the day longer. This added about an hour or more to the stuff we had to do each day.
Like any bike trip it is always best as a shared experience. Jack and Dorthy are platinum members of my travel club and are always fun to travel with. In fact the reason that we did this trip was because of a conversation we had during the Philly club bike trip to Gettysburg. Jack was asking a couple what is the best bike trip they ever did and they told us about the GAP trail and the idea stuck and now we did it. Bob also fit in well and is now an honorary member of the insane bike posse.
The last thing that this trip showed me was that there are a lot of possibilities for fun bike trips on mountain bikes, Now that I have a good mountain bike that I know I can do long rides on I now have a whole new set of places I can go and explore. A lot of people we met on the trail were doing the C&O trail to DC so that is now on my list. There are always new trail being created so there will be more trips like this in my future.
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