A Grand Old Lady Comes Roaring Back

Paul’s and my account of our bike trip on the C & O Towpath appeared in my last post, “Vacation/Adventure.” There was, however, a third party on that trip – Cilantro, our original tandem bicycle, came out of retirement and made a triumphant return. Here is her story.

It’s an old, familiar tale.  I was Paul and Jill’s first tandem bike and I gave them the best years of my life. I never made snide comments while they figured out how to get on and off a tandem bicycle gracefully. I held steady while they learned to negotiate hills and curves safely. I took them to Oxford on Saturday mornings for donuts and coffee cake, to Indiana with 5,000 other Hilly Hundred riders, and to Holmes County, sharing the gravel roads with Amish buggies. No matter where they went, my wide, mountain bike tires and sturdy steel frame provided a soft, cushy ride.  I didn’t even complain when Paul and their son John took me on those insane mountain bike trails, bouncing over logs, down dry creek beds and around trees. I’m not going to comment on the mentality that finds fun in that sort of craziness. 

Not only did I take Paul and Jill on biking adventures – I also went on some adventures without them.  I had my first ride on the C & O Towpath with their friends Maria and Chris – the three of us did the entire 185 miles from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, D.C., including the infamous, 3,000 foot long Paw Paw tunnel through the Alleghenies (not my favorite part.) I also earned the nickname “The Love Boat” when their friends Matt and Amber took me on a biking honeymoon.  Take it from me – that marriage between a fanatic mountain bike racer and a petite, non-biker would never have made it past the honeymoon without a tandem bike.

I carved out a good, solid place for myself through hard work, dependability and congeniality.  I kept myself fit as well – no rust on my classy, ice blue frame and only a few nicks and dings as souvenirs of a life well-lived.  Then one day without any warning, Paul brought home this shiny, bottle green, skinny-tire tandem named Big Al.  (Just like a guy – always has to be Big something or other.)  Next thing I knew, we were sharing the same garage space. Before long, Big Al was in the front row and I was permanently assigned to the back.

Somehow, whenever Paul and Jill took off on a ride, I got left behind. They thought Big Al’s skinny tires and lightweight aluminum frame made it easier for them to keep up with their friends.  I thought they needed some new friends – I mean, whatever happened to “Slow but steady wins the race?”  For awhile they took both of us on trips to Door County; but somehow Big Al always got called up on the sunny days to cruise the wide, open roads. My turn came on the misty days, the sandy trails and the bumpy rides.   Now, I’m not complaining; but, if Big Al is such a hotshot, how come he doesn’t tackle puddles or gravel.  My best day was when Big Al had a gear shifting problem and had to cool his pedals at the bike shop. I thumbed my handlebars at him as Paul, Jill and I rode off.

For the last few years, I’ve pretty much been retired.  I have nice quarters in Paul and Jill’s unfinished basement which is dry and clean, but it’s a little boring.  Backpacks and rain jackets aren’t the most stimulating conversationalists.  So you can imagine how excited I was when they started talking about a return trip to the C & O Towpath.  Who has the heavy frame and sturdy tires to tackle the towpath’s rocks, mud, gravel, grass and tree roots?  Who has the strength and the stability to pull a Bob Trailer full of gear? Certainly not Big Al, that twit.

It was a glorious week.  I took Paul, Jill and their Bob Trailer past beautiful scenery, and up and down big hills without breaking a sweat.  I negotiated narrow entry gates, high bridges and sand without losing my balance.  I took it well when every square inch of me was caked with mud and all I got was a sponge bath out of an iron pump.  I kept my cool even when sticks scattered across the towpath caused my chain to come off five times in a one-mile stretch.  And, I made it over all sorts of surfaces without a flat tire.

I stayed in some great places along the way.  I spent the night in a cozy barn at Georges Mill Farm.  The lock house basements were very comfortable and, in one, my bedroom was definitely cooler than Paul and Jill’s.  At the Jacob Rohrbach Inn, I stayed in a garage full of rental bikes – cute but empty headed and pretty ignorant. Since they rarely venture more than 10 miles from the inn, they kept me up most of the night with questions about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen.

Best of all, I found I can still turn heads, even with close to 20 years on me. When Paul and Jill had a breakfast of BLT’s in the Desert Rose Café, the owner of the local bike shop stopped in to ask, “Is that your cool bike out there?”   Little kids pointed at me and waved all the time.  Couples struggling to keep up with each other on single bikes admired me, and one boy in Sharpsburg called out hopefully, “I’d like to have that bike.”

Now I’m back at home, totally cleaned up, resting in the basement and enjoying my memories.  I have the satisfaction of knowing that, even though Big Al is younger and faster, I’ve been places where he’ll never go, even if he lives to be twice my age.  I also know that, across the country, many former railroad beds have been turned into packed gravel bike trails; and Paul and Jill are already talking about some future trips. The C & O Towpath was definitely not my last hurrah.

Vacation/Adventure

The last of my blackened toenails from our hike in Italy fell off about 4 days before we started our latest vacation/adventure - biking the C & O Canal towpath.  That seemed very Asian – representing the balance and symmetry of life or something like that.  As for vacation/adventures, discovering a new ice cream parlor on vacation is a big enough adventure for me.  Paul, however, sees the words “vacation” and “adventure” as synonyms and neither has anything to do with ice cream cones.

I actually was the one who suggested this particular vacation/adventure.  We had biked some sections of the towpath in the past and I thought it would be nice to revisit it for a week.  Conceived by Washington, promoted by Jefferson and opened in the 1830’s, the C & O Canal was supposed to provide a waterway to transport goods between the Washington, D.C. area and the Ohio River at Pittsburgh.  It reached Cumberland, Maryland 185 miles from Washington before it stalled out, bankrupt and upstaged by the railroads.  In the 1950’s, Supreme Court Justice Douglas saved the remains of the canal from becoming a paved road, creating our longest and narrowest National Park.  The towpath, once used by the mules pulling boats along the canal, is now a packed-dirt and gravel path for walking and biking that passes classic old canal and railroad towns.

Some people drive to a town and stay there for a few days biking the canal and sightseeing before driving to the next town.  You can probably guess which one of us would have been fine with that and which one wanted something more edgy.  So, I mapped out a plan to leave our car about 1/3 of the way into the towpath and bike from there to Washington, D.C. and back, without the car.  I had a bailout plan where, after a few days, if the weather was bad, we could return to our car and use it for the second half of the trip.  Realistically, a combination typhoon, monsoon, tsunami and hurricane would have been the only perfect storm leading to that outcome.

We attached a little trailer named Bob to the back of the bike; Bob holds a good sized duffle bag of stuff.  The duffle, however, turned out to be shockingly heavy when we loaded it up for the first time.  While waiting out a thunderstorm, we thought about what to leave behind.  When the weather cleared, I ditched one biking outfit, extra shorts, my writing tablet and a pair of shoes.  I chose between a bottle of wine and liquid soap (not a hard choice) and gave up half a package of fig bars and half my Kashi bars – at least they weren’t Oreos.  We decided to share deodorant and Paul took out some of his stuff. When I was packing his 5-pound shoes, he asked me three times if I really needed my 2 ounce bottle of make-up and my LITTLE containers of special shampoo, conditioner and gel. (YES! YES! and YES!)  I offered to compare the total weight of his stuff against mine but we didn’t have a scale. By the end of the trip, I had used every last sock and he still had a bag of unused clothes.  HA!

A few days before we were to leave, I wondered if we had made a bad choice with all this year’s rain and flooding.  In a canal website blog posting, some guy complained that the rocky, bumpy, muddy trail limited his speed to about 5 miles an hour, gave him flat tires and eventually caused him to bail out.  He also ran out of water because he thought the Park Service water pump was unsafe since there was a dead deer lying in the water nearby.  (“A First Class Weenie!” according to Paul.)  My friend Jean said her butcher’s son found dead fish everywhere along the canal and one gigantic one (I visualized Moby Dick) in the middle of the towpath.  But by then we were already committed.

 

As usual, my worries were unnecessary. By the time we started our trip, the flood waters had receded, most parts of the trail had been repaired and rolled smooth and we didn’t see a dead fish anywhere.  There were some bumps, a few limbs across the trail and enough muddy spots to leave my legs and Paul’s yellow biking shirt looking like cheetah wannabees but that didn’t hold us back.  We had peaceful, pleasant rides each day past scenic dams, locks, and lock houses often with the canal on one side and the Potomac River on the other.   The canal itself ranged from placid water to murky swamp to grass and trees; while the Potomac was wide and smooth in some areas and dotted with rocks and rapids in others.  Our wildlife sightings included a blacksnake, red fox, turtles, woodchucks, an eagle, egrets and herons, a weasel and many deer which are much cuter when they’re eating something besides Paul’s perennials. It was great biking, even the one day when we rode about 75 miles without so much as one square of chocolate.

We spent our nights in beautiful, out-of-the –way places including Georges Mill Farm (left) which has been in the same family for nine generations and the Jacob Rohrbach Inn, a large, comfortable house built in 1804 and used during the Civil War as a field hospital (photo with paragraph 4.)  We also stayed in two of the old lock houses – the one was furnished in a 1950’s style complete with an Ike and Mamie Eisenhower commemorative plate while the other, our favorite, transported us back to the 1830’s, offering tranquility, a vintage kitchen and a lovely front porch view in place of air conditioning (photos paragraph 5.) 

A big advantage of biking between 30 and 70 miles every day is that you can devour things like berry bread pudding and lemon pancakes and croissant omelets for breakfast.  You can put down a three-inch thick deli sub for lunch.  You can sample crab cakes everywhere – in Maryland, crab cakes are like pastrami in New York or brats in Milwaukee or chili in Cincinnati.  You can enjoy a cone at Nutter’s Ice Cream Store; but you should know that “small” means two large scoops and, if you order Java Chunk, you’d better have a good book with you. 

If you’re Paul, you can even flirt with the idea of eating The Monument at Captain Bender’s in Sharpsburg – “Three 8 ounce Black Angus burger patties stacked high on a Kaiser roll with lettuce and tomato.  Layered with chili, cheese, hot sauce, fried pickles, onion rings and spicy dipping sauce.  Served with a dill pickle spear and cheese fries topped with bacon and sour cream.”  It costs $28.24, but if you eat the whole thing, it’s free.  Paul considered it until our friendly bartender/waiter warned him that most people, who plow through the burger, hit the wall when it comes to the fries.  You could also go on a bender with one of Captain Bender’s signature drinks like Canal Water (Melon Liquor, pineapple juice and Sprite) or a Duck Shot (a duck decoy filled with 12 ounces of beer and a shot of amaretto.)

Our luck with the weather lasted all week – the bike was in the van, our massive bag of dirty clothes was stowed away, Paul was in the shower and I was relaxing on the porch of the 1828 Trail Inn in Hancock, Maryland when it started to rain.  I had hoped the benefits of biking 300 miles in a week might include sculpted, rock-hard calves or a few less pounds in my bike shorts or no more Saggy Baggy Elephant staring at me when I do leg lifts. That part didn’t work out.  After all this was a week-long bike trip, not a miracle makeover; and I wasn’t exactly living on non-fat yogurt and birdseed.  Still it was a wonderful vacation and a wonderful adventure. We’ve started thinking about other long trips with just us, the bike and Bob.