Category: #bikedc

The Mount Vernon Trail – From the Sublime to the Rediculous

The Sublime

Today was just another ride on the MVT. I rode south of home to check out the replacement bridge near Fort Hunt Park. It has only been open for a day or two. The old trail was narrow and bumpy and the approach to the bridge had steep switchbacks with no shoulders. (Who’d have thought this was a good idea in the first place?) It was one of the highest crash locations on the trail. Mrs. Rootchopper was one such victim.

The replacement includes a wide trail with new pavement on both ends from street intersections on Waynewood Boulevard and the Fort Hunt Park access road. The new bridge is higher and wider than the old one and switchbacks are no longer a feature of the approach.

This project has been in the works for a long time. Unfortunately, the southern end of this section of trail connects to a narrow winding trail with washboard root heaves and another, similar dangerous bridge on which I crashed 30+ years ago. This second bridge was itself a replacement for a bridge that was even worse. Funding for the improvements in this area came about after a US senator’s wife was seriously injured.

New bridge on the Mount Vernon Trail
New Bridge on the Mount Vernon Trail

The Ridiculous

After checking out the bridge I rode north through Old Town Alexandria. At Canal Center just to the north of Old Town the trail splits into two: the left side goes around the old power plant along the GW Parkway while the right goes around the plant along the river. I was planning on going left when I came upon three young men and a shiny white Toyota. The car was parked directly on the trail. Apparently the men were photographing it. (The only reason I could think of doing this on the trail was to ensure that no other cars were in the picture. Ironic, no?)

I told them to move the car off the trail. They blew me off. I said you can laugh when the police come.

I rode a mile north and turned around using the river route. The three photographers were now shooting a blue sedan on the trail. I lost it. Words were used. One of them called me a racist. (They were POCs; I am white.) After more words that advanced the cause of bike trails not at all, I took a picture for posterity then rode off. I called the Alexandria police but I have no idea if they sent someone out to roust the rapscallions.

Just for context three weeks ago I was passed by a couple on a gas powered motor scooter on the trail near National Airport. I guess they were afraid to ride it on the Parkway. About a week ago, I saw a photo of a car stopped on the trail north of the power plant. The driver had to jump a curb to pull this off so it showed remarkable disregard for trail users. And let’s not even talk about me getting hit by a car on the trail a few years ago. (No right on red? You can’t be serious. This is only a 3,000 pound SUV.)

Three knuckleheads using the Mount Vernon Trail for a auto photo shoot
They clearly weren’t interested in good lighting.

August 2022 by the numbers

August is usually a slow month for me. I tend to ride less for reasons that vary. This year I took four days off to go to Asheville, North Carolina with my wife and daughter. We toured Biltmore for the second time. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. We also did a lot of hanging around in Asheville and came to the conclusion that we’d never want to live there.

As for reading, I polished off some of my backlog of magazines that piled up while I was riding across the country. My brother Jim gave me a book of essays on bicycles and bicycling called Two Wheels Good by Jody Rosen. I found the chapter on Bikecentennial to be especially interesting. There was also a good account of the claims by many to being the inventor of the bicycle. On the watching front I managed to sit through Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, two hours of my life I wish I had back. I also binge watched in one sitting Obi Wan Kenobi which I thought was surprisingly good. I had low expectations, I suppose, after The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian. Also, Hayden Christensen didn’t totally suck.

Big Nellie and I went to see the Nationals play a game. They didn’t totally suck either and they won.

As for riding, I managed to squeeze out 1,070.5 miles, exceeding 1,000 miles for the fourth month in a row. I started doing 60 mile rides every other day. I find that I can just put my brain into touring mode and ride all day. I discovered a brochure that includes six loop rides in Talbot County, Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The rides are flat and mostly car free. The maps in the brochure are color coded so that you can easily construct rides that are two or more loops long or add or subtract pieces of rides to make shorter loops.

I did my long rides on my Cross Check (679.5 miles). Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent did most of the short days after my 60-mile rides (243.5 miles). The Mule contributed 100.5 miles until it made it to 68,000 miles. The rest was from riding Little Nellie to and from the car repair place. (My 2009 Accord was in need of new rubber and a working air conditioner. Suffice it to say, my wallet took a hit.) I use the car mostly for driving to places where I can ride my bike.

So far this year, I’ve ridden 7,910 miles, more than half of that was on The Mule because of the 3,400+ mile bike tour. I’m on a pace for 11,881 miles this year.

Bike Tour 2022 – Loose Ends

Some interesting things happened since I returned home. The day after I arrived I couldn’t hear anything and my sinuses were stuffed. I thought it was from sitting close to the engine on three flights. And maybe jet lag was playing a role. After a day of this, I decided to take a Covid test. Positive. I took another. Positive again. Dang. I called my doctor and we did a remote consult. He put me on Paxlovid. Within 36 hours I was back to normal. I coughed a lot but that was part of the process of my sinuses clearing.

Another annoying thing happened. My pants kept falling off. I had to tighten my belt to absurd lengths to keep them on. My beltless bike shorts (they go over my bike tights) were snug when I left home in May. Now I put them on and they’d fall straight to my ankles. To keep them on, I resorted to rolling the waist band,

After I recovered from Covid, The Mule arrived home. (It was packed flawlessly by West End Bikes of Portland.) So there I am in my bike pants trying to unbox and re-assemble The Mule. I had the frame out of the box. Every tube was wrapped in either heavy cardboard or styrofoam tubing. The styrofoam was affixed to the bike using zip ties. I pulled out my trusty Swiss army knife. It was super sharp because I have only used it a couple of times since I bought it in May. As I went to cut a tie, my hand slipped and I put a deep gash into my left thumb.

There was blood everywhere. I tried to continue with the bike but it was pointless. So I put my thumb in my mouth and walked around the house to go inside and bandage it. Except my pants kept falling down. There I am sucking my thumb, bleeding from one hand and holding my pants up with the other. Thankfully my kids and wife weren’t around to laugh their asses off at me.

The thumb is healing slowly, and The Mule is back on the road.

Today I went to my doctor for my first physical in three years. The doctor’s assistant weighed me. 198 pounds. I am below the Mendoza line for the first time in four years (when I came back from the 2018 tour.) This means that, when I came back from Portland two weeks ago, I probably weighed around 195 because I have been eating more and biking less. I must have weighed north of 215 pounds at the start of the tour. No wonder my pants are falling down.

As readers may recall, while riding down the highway along the Lochsa River in Idaho, Mark was given a traffic citation for failing to ride as far to the right as is safe. That’s what Idaho law calls for. A driver had passed Mark on a blind curve and nearly hit an oncoming vehicle,. which happened to be a Sheriff’s car. The car was driven by a chubby cheeked deputy who looked all of 22 years old. The deputy pulled a uey and gave chase. He pulled over the offending driver. The driver explained that he had no choice but to pass Mark because he came on Mark so suddenly. And that Mark was in his way. The deputy let the driver go and gave Mark a ticket. The next day we rode to the county magistrate’s office in Grangeville, the county seat. Mark arranged for a hearing via Zoom to contest the ticket. Today, Mark had his hearing. Barney didn’t appear. The ticket was dismissed. Justice was served.

July 2022 in the Books

Riding

Well, July was an interesting month. I managed to ride 1,321 miles even while taking a week off because of travel and quarantine. All but 60 of those miles were part of my bike tour. I finished the tour with 3,449 miles, my second longest tour ever. And it sure felt like it. 66 is not the new 62.

The longest ride was 95.5 miles from McKenzie River to Corvallis. Corey had started the day joking about riding 100 miles. We nearly pulled it off.

This was my third month in a row with over 1,000 miles. I didn’t come close to breaking my month record which was over 2,000 miles on my 2018 tour.

For the year I have ridden 6,839.5 miles, on a pace for 11,776 miles for the year. If only I can squeeze in another tour, I might just make it. (Not gonna happen.)

Reading

After two months on the road I bought two books for my trip home. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien us about storytelling and about being a kid soldier in Vietnam. I was watching an episode of the old WWII TV show Combat! and one thing stuck out: all the actors are in their 30s and 40s. O’Brien’s book is about kids just out of high school. It’s also about the art of telling a story. Strangely the book works really well.

The other book I read was Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By. It was the basis for the old Paul Newman movie, Hud. I am now interested in watching Hud to see how much the original material was changed. It was McMurtry’s first book and he captures life and language on a ranch in north Texas with great skill.

I have a stack of reading – Adventure Cycling Magazine, National Geographic, and two books that arrived while I was away. It’ll take me all of August to get through it all.

Watching

I watched two movies this month. The Fundamentals of Caring. It has Paul Rudd. I’ll watch Paul Rudd in anything. The Bucket List is a weird buddy movie about two old guys on their last legs. It was directed by Rob Reiner. Mediocre with Nicholson chewing the scenery in every scene. The chemistry between the two leads was never quite right. Also, there were multiple continuity errors that were really annoying.

I have fallen behind all the Star Wars and Marvel shows. Once I can be in the same room as my wife (three more days of masking) I’ll cue them up.

Recovering

I am out of quarantine but still need to wear an N95 mask. My wife and I are living on separate floors to the extent possible. Next Thursday we can revert to normal. Unless I relapse.

Bike Tour 2022 – Update and Pictures

My Covid symptoms are milder by the day. I am taking Paxlovid and staying indoors which has given me plenty of time to get most of my tour business done. (I still need to make my Cycleblaze journal but that will take a few days.) I expect to be released – masked for the first five days – on Saturday as long as I have no symptoms. Right now my worst symptoms (minor though they are) seem to be side effects of the Paxlovid.

While I’ve been lolling about I’ve read two books, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a memoir/novel about a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam. It won a Pulitzer Prize back in the early 90s. I bought it more or less on impulse after reading a couple of pages. It is extraordinarily well written. Today, I finished Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By about a family in turmoil in north Texas in the 1950s. It was the basis for the movie, Hud. I liked it a lot as well.

Today, I went through my pictures from the trip. Some were uploaded to this blog. Others were put on Instagram or sent to friends. I tried to find all of them but I am sure I missed a few shots trails and roads and rocks. I sorted them by date so you can take a quick 3,449 mile bike trip across the country by accessing my Bike Tour 2022 album on Flickr.

Bike Tour 2022 – The Journey Home

About a week before I expected to finish my bike tour, I booked a flight home from Portland on Southwest Airlines. I chose Southwest because I had enough points on my Southwest account that I could fly for free. I chose a flight between 10 and 11 on Saturday morning. All the other flights left before 6 am. I also chose this flight because it had only one stop, Chicago’s Midway airport.

I was about to call a cab to go to the airport when I received a notice from Southwest that my Portland to Chicago flight had been canceled. Southwest re-routed me on a two-stop flight leaving Portland at 5:40 am on Sunday. UGH!

After much agonizing about getting a hotel, I decided to extend my stay at the hostel. I did some laundry, read a book, and took a walk. At 10 pm I went to sleep for five hours.

My cab arrived at 3:30. 20 minutes and $50 later I was at the airport. I tried to use a kiosk to check in but the software wouldn’t let me. So I got in the long line to see an agent at the check in counter. The line moved fast. I explained calmly to the agent that I had been rebooked. She immediately gave me preboarding status on all three flights. This was a courtesy I was later to learn was extended to others who had been re-scheduled.

When I lined up for my first flight and saw all the people waiting to board, I was feeling burnt out and a little angry, despite my preboarding status. I started chatting with a woman standing next to me. She was traveling with her family to DC to attend a conference about disabled people. She, her husband, and younger son were traveling with her elder son who was obviously disabled; he could walk but needed to much assistance and persuasion to board the flight.

To make matters worse, the family had missed the first day of the conference.

So much for my personal pity party.

When I left the plane at Denver, I was met by a woman with a wheelchair. I turned it down, of course. It gave me a good laugh, though.

The next two flights, Denver to Dallas and Dallas to DC, had more disabled people in the preboarding line. This included five people in wheelchairs in addition to the family I met in line in Portland.

During the descent to Dallas my ears plugged up and became very painful. The pain went away but the “plugging up” worsened. By the time I arrived in DC, I couldn’t hear a thing. I attributed the hearing loss to sitting next to one of the plane’s engines.

With two connections, I assumed my bags would be delayed or lost. In fact, I had only a five minute wait for them once I arrived at baggage claim.

I hefted my tent bag and my duffle and headed outside for a cab. There were none. I took an airport shuttle to the main terminal where the shuttle driver dropped us about 150 yards from the taxi line.

For the previous two weeks my back and legs had shown little sign of my stenosis problems. Hauling those bags around at the airport brought my stenosis symptoms back.

Once I arrived home, I realized I could not hear our whole house air conditioner running. I did some laundry and couldn’t hear the machines working. I had a stuffed up head and felt tired. I attributed this to jet lag.

Today I went to the pharmacy to get a prescription refilled. While waiting I went to the barbershop. I returned home with my medicine and some ear drops to unplug my ears. Curiously, I was now coughing up drainage from my sinuses.

After tending to post-ride business, I took a nap. After dinner I decided to test myself for Covid. Knock me down with a feather, I’m positive. After two months on the road, I finally caught the disease. I had previously made an appointment with my primary car doctor for tomorrow so I’ll probably be zooming with him.

We have a winner! I tested myself twice. So far it feels like I have a cold in my nose. Luckily I have a doctor appointment tomorrow anyway
Might as well test myself twice, right?

I am four times vaxxed and eligible for Paxlovid. No worries.

Bike Tour 2022 – Stuck in Portland

About an hour before I was going to call for a cab, Southwest Airlines informed me that my flight had been cancelled.

Lovely.

They rebooked me on a series of three flights, the first of which leaves Portland at 5:35 am tomorrow. After checking for alternatives, I decided to go with the glue and extended my stay at the hostel, and booked a cab for 3:15 am.

My flights are Portland to Denver, Denver to Dallas, Dallas to Washington National. I would guess that my probability of arriving at home tomorrow is no better than 25 percent. Hence I am doing laundry to feel somewhat productive.

I should point out that Southwest has been unable to provide any guidance except for the new booking. They didn’t answer their phone (I waited an hour on hold), their online chat was useless, and their email response told me they’d get back to me within ten days.

I am hoping to get reimbursed for my additional lodging costs.

Bike Tour 2022 – The Mule Abides in Portland

The day began with coffee and granola in the hostel cafe. Afterward Corey packed up all his cares and woes and took off for a nostalgia tour of Portland (he has a daughter who attended Reed College) and then head to the Amtrak station. We confirmed last night that his bike tools will remove his pedals, essential for boxing his bike.

This morning I rode a half mile to West End Bikes and turned over The Mule for shipping. West End shipped The Mule home in 2018 and it arrived intact.

Corey and I shared a room last night with a bike tourist who just did a loop ride in western and central Oregon. He’s now headed north. He wasn’t exactly chatty but that’s okay.

I’m killing time here at the hostel. My flight leaves tomorrow afternoon which should give me plenty of time to chill. (I hate to bring this up but it’s actually kind of cold here.)

As far as bicycling goes, the tour is now officially over. Thanks to everyone who read these blog posts. Your encouragement of my insane little adventure is most appreciated.

In the coming weeks I will convert these blog posts into a proper journal on Cycleblaze.com when I get the time.

I’ll also post a few more entries reflecting on the tour.

Miles today: 0.5 Tour miles: 3,449.5

Bike Tour 2022 – Kelso, Washington to Portland, Oregon

Our hotel was enormous. Its long hallways reminded me of The Shining.

The hotel cannot find enough staff to operate properly. Breakfast was a disappointment. At this stage a couple of bowls of Raisin Bran and some coffee gets the job done.

After a tour of industrial Longview we rode back across the Lewis and Clark Bridge to US 30 in Oregon. The bridge is downright scary. It’s noisy and shaky and has shoulders filled with debris.

We were glad to be off of it except for the fact that US 30 to Portland is nearly as nasty. The shoulders were adequate and the debris was less but the trucks made for a deafening bike ride.

We rode. All business. Get her done. No need for excess hemoglobin because there were no hills to speak of.

After about 50 miles we left the highway to ride the street grid to Union Station. Corey went inside to check out the bicycle-on-train situation. He could have put his bike n the baggie car unboxed but decided to box it for protection anyway. Amtrak will provide the box and tape. He also learned that for a reasonable price he gets to head home tomorrow, a day earlier than planned.

After scoring an Amtrak win we decided to check into the NW Portland Hostel where I stayed in 2018. It’s located a few minutes from the train station, the bike shop I’m going to use to ship my bike home, and lots of hip places for bike tourist celebrities like us.

Note also that we have N95 masks for the event that we have to share our room with a Covid vector.

Tomorrow we’ll prep for our respective journeys home.

End of the road for the tour
Finally!
Postcards in the lobby of the NW Portland Hostel
At the hostel: Postcards. And Stamps. Very retro.
Shoes died a hero
My bike shoes died a hero. Made it all the way thanks to Gorilla Glue and duct tape

Miles today: 56 Tour miles: 3,449

Bike Tour 2022 – Astoria, Oregon to Kelso, Washington

And you thought the tour was over?

Our night as bridge trolls worked out okay for me. Corey was kept up by the clomping of feet in the room above us.

We began the day with breakfast at Pig and Pancakes, a chain apparently. We ate at one in Cannon Beach. Fortified with pancakes (good), coffee (not bad), and scrambled eggs (meh) we headed east out of Astoria on US 30 headed for Portland.

Traffic was heavy, the shoulder was debris-filled, and the air was filled with mist. The road rolled up and down with the occasional somewhat serious climb. No matter. Our blood is still teeming with hemoglobin.

I began the day with a very sore lower back. The pain abated with every mile, and a couple tablets of Vitamin I.

Corey stopped and pointed out Mt Rainier. After about 30 miles we stopped at a gas station for snackage. A fuel truck driver gabbed with us. He said it wasn’t Rainier. He also told us the next climb would be four miles at six percent grade.

Corey and I agreed that it was a serious climb, made much worse by the incessant traffic and inadequate shoulder. We also agreed that it couldn’t have been four miles.

During a leveling off we saw two snow covered mountains in the distance. I have no idea which two it was. I think the one on the left is Mount Fuji but I could mistaken. I’m any case the one on the right was Mount Vesuvius for sure.

Rainier and St Helens (I think)
Fuji and Vesuvius

We had a crazy fast descent to the exit for Longview, Washington. Longview is halfway to Portland and has many motels and restaurants. According to Fuel Truck Driver there are many methheads there too.

The ride across the Columbia River was very stressful. Logging trucks go to Longview to drop their loads at the port and a paper mill. The shoulder was littered with chunks of bark. The crossing was not a lot of fun.

We stopped at Walmart where I bought a duffel bag to consolidate my panniers into for my flight home and a t-shirt to wear on the plane. (Laundry opportunities are unlikely between now and Saturday morning.)

Next we went to a bike shop for air for my rear tire and recommendations for motels and lunch. The lunch restaurant one of the bike shop guys recommended was right around the corner.

I had a cup of pig butt stew as a side dish. It was very tasty. I wish I had ordered a huge bowl of it and skipped the chicken caesar wrap.

After lunch we rode across the Cowlitz River to Kelso where we found a hotel for $120. It’s not bad at all. The lobby is rather posh.

Tomorrow it’s back across the pine bark bridge and another 50 miles to Portland, this time without the long climb. We plan to go to Union Station to get some definitive answer about whether Corey had to box his bike up for his train ride home. (In some cities you can just put your bike in the baggage car. Also, if a bike box is needed we’ll have to find out if Amtrak supplies them.)

Miles today: 57 Tour miles: 3,393