Why are we here? Here begins the 9 day trip from New Jersey to Arkansas and back, to mark the 50th year of me being on Earth. D and I talked about this a while ago, tossed some ideas back & forth, and decided that a road trip with just us, in the fall, to a mountain bike destination made the most sense. That’s the premise of the next 9 days.
But today is a travel day. While moving is part of the travel, most of today & tomorrow will be spent in the car. In between the start & end of the day, we will be riding somewhere each day. We have a loose plan for today and a less loose plan for tomorrow.
We start the day a bit east of Harrisburg at Swarata State Park. This is a place that was recommended by Brian and it worked as a quick stop on our long drive day. But before this, I need to swap out my wheel.
The rear wheel has been difficult since I put on a new tire. On the trip to Mass, it kept losing air until the last day when I barely made it to the end of the ride. I tried to remount it and it worked well yesterday until it didn’t. It was flat again this morning and when we got to the parking lot, I decided to use the backup wheel with the brand new tire mounted. I swapped the cassette & rotor to that wheel.
This backup wheel has a new hub on it, because the last one failed. I would not be telling you this if everything went fine. But the hub fails after a mile. So we go back to the lot and I now have a wheel with a failed hub, and a wheel that has a tire that will not hold air. I put a tube in the first one, move the cassette & rotor back to that wheel, and put that wheel back on the bike,
Then we rode the park. It was really easy to navigate. We rode in a general CCW direction and did the trails in this order: A1, A2, B, C, D, then A back to the car. In the end we got almost 10 miles of decent, leaf-covered trails. Good way to start the journey. The park was good for exactly what we needed. And the trail naming convention made it easy to follow. However, big fat F for trail name creativity.
The Strava link can be found here.
We hop in the car and D makes us both turkey sandwiches on the road. Then we stop at D&D for 2 cups of tea and hit the road again. At this point D takes the wheel and I work.
A side note about my current work reality. There’s currently NFW I can take a whole week off. This really blows in a micro view. But in a macro view, this allows me to take another vacation later in the year and not worry about it. Work has ebbs & flows and right now we are flowing mad-style. So it goes.
We get gas and some guy from NJ (not me) seems to have never pumped gas ever in his life. We swap drivers after gas and I take over.
At mile 329 we get on I-70. We will be on this road until St. Louis. At mile 385 we hit a bit of traffic but it doesn’t last.
We stop and get pizza at Four Star Pizza in Zanesville. The guy working there used to live in Parsippany. I find that everyone in the country has some tie to NJ. While we wait for the pizza, D books a hotel east of Indianapolis. So we are now committed to making it all the way out there today, which will make tomorrow better.
D drives while we eat, and the pizza is surprisingly tasty. The sun sets and we cruise our way out of Ohio and into Indiana. This is a new state for me – never been here before.
Day 1 of 9 done. Lots of driving but some good stuff in there too. The country seems pretty big but when you set yourself to it, you can get across large swaths of it pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. 695 miles down. Less than 600 to go tomorrow.
Traveling Normandy 