Day 0 Start: The lonely rice paddy
Day Finish: Pittsburgh, PA.
Miles Driven: 400’ish
Miles Cycled: About 0.2

What should one do in a time of global pandemic, and grave national peril? Take a long bike ride, of course. I’m being 90% serious and only 10% facetious; what better time to disconnect from media, and explore the great vastness of our country through the fantastic stereoscopic imaging devices most of us are blessed to have installed just above our sniffers, and below our shiny foreheads, rather than the glowing monocle in our pockets that serves as little more than a high-definition reality distortion field.

The moment I discovered, some years ago, that there was a 300+ mile trail that connected Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC., with nary a motor vehicle to be found on the entire stretch, I was intrigued. Going from north to south, the expanse starts with the Great Alleghany Passage (GAP), a multi-use trail converted from a former railroad right of way, which connects in Cumberland, MD, with the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Towpath. The C&O was a canal designed to compete with the emerging railroad network of the time, and has a series of locks designed to transport goods on barges that were towed by pack animals (hence the towpath in the name). What better place for a water buffalo?

Suffering from a combination of lockdown fatigue, need of adventure, and desire to recon the trail for a future family trip, I hatched a plan to make a solo trip down the trail, aiming for about 60 miles per day and a week away from my day-to-day pandemic routine.

After exploring a few different options, I ended up grabbing a one-way rental car, which I picked up and loaded last night, and that whisked me to Pittsburgh with little fanfare or hassle. 

on arrival, I unloaded and reassembled my bike, sped down the five stories of parking garage, and rolled the couple blocks to my hotel, my first hotel since February, which is a significant milestone for someone that spent 50-150 nights in hotels for the better part of the last 20 years.

I had some time to explore, and in the interest of moving muscles and joints that had sat patiently in the car, I walked the beginning couple miles of the trip to streamline tomorrow’s departure.

I’d first visited Pittsburgh about 10 years ago when I was working with various oil and gas companies, and Pittsburgh was my jumping-off point into fracking country, and provided a night or two in a decent hotel, and a good meal before driving into the simultaneously invigorating and depressing lands that had weathered a half-dozen carbon-driven boom and bust cycles. First with coal mining, then with the early waves of oil exploration, and now with fracking. I remember tales of immigrant great grandparents who scratched out a living in the Pennsylvania coal mines, one of whom died from black lung as a young man, and I always felt a connection to the men and women who made a living in these dangerous industries, only to see a lucrative job disappear overnight due to economic vagaries or unpredictable swings in supply and demand.

Pittsburgh always felt like a scrappy, tough city to me, but in a positive way. It was Rocky Balboa, a fighter who had been knocked out, come back, and then done it all over again. It was nice to walk the streets and still see people of all descriptions in the parks, dining on the sidewalks, and generally existing with little fuss or drama.

A pleasant dinner, cool walk back to the hotel, and now the screeching of trains somewhere in the distance feels reassuring. The wheels of Pittsburgh and the nation are still turning. There’s still exploring to be done, and forward progress to be made.

Assuming more than occasional connectivity, I’ll post updates as I proceed towards our nation’s capital. I can already feel that this trip will be good medicine, and I’m relishing reconnecting with the simple flow of life that comes with eating, pedaling, sleeping, contemplating, and little else.