Independent thinking expressed intelligently
Day 1: Killarney to the Black Valley You wake up in the dark. The wind outside is screaming. It’s the sea-bred, haystack-leveling wind that howled around Yeats’s tower and his stone bridge a hundred years ago. For an hour the poet paced and thought while gloom came in his mind. You’re not pacing. You’re lying […]
O glorious Day 5! Sunlight and dry Towpath! Dawn frightened us. Harper’s Ferry from Hancock is longer even than Hancock from Cumberland, and after the “Long Slog” (that is the name of Day 4) we were exhausted in legs and spirit. Our quads ached. And now we faced another longer day of staring right over our handlebars […]
Cumberland, MD is the transfer city, where the Great Allegheny Passage ends and the C&O Towpath begins. Day 3, we zoomed down through the Cumberland Narrows, the gap up into mountains and on to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, the pass that connected the East with what was then called the “West” of the U. S. […]
WE could walk. That was the first thing to notice coming down the stairs in the morning. Our quads had not seized up like a bike crank does when the chair comes off. We stayed at this house. Dairy farmers Debbie and Lynn (?) bought it in 1998, spent three years restoring it, before they […]
. . . if the prevailing winds blow from Pittsburgh to D. C., as the website promises, they have not prevailed. We rode into a head wind–not to say “gale force”–of pretty considerable strength.
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