Oct. 22

Oct. 21

Oct. 20

Paw Paw Tunnel

October 19th

Breakfast at Outflow Campground, oats are king for camp breakfast. 

Pinkerton Tunnel, aka The Kissing Tunnel

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Big Savage Tunnel would be closing for winter a few weeks our passage.

Carrie got a flat just outside of Frostburg and the Borden Tunnel.  We got a hotel for the night so we could recharge things.  After checking in we went to a Mexican restaurant around the corner!  

October 16/17/18th, 2016

 Sunday
   Tomorrow we drive to Pittsburgh from Deep Creek, MD.  It should be about two hours.  There's an Avis downtown, where we'll drop off the rental car and put together our bikes.  From there we'll make our way through the city, stopping at a few places for supplies.  Our first stop will be at the visitors center for a map of the GAP and any other useful resources.  There's a PDF that I could have printed off before the
trip(except that I don't have a printer) but I thought about what Toni and Rico would have done.  They would have just rolled into town and found a map, and camped "anywhere".  So that's what we'll do.
   Second, we'll go to the S&D Polish Deli for a Pierogi lunch and some provisions for other meals.  I'm pretty excited about this as I've not had much Polish Deli food.  After that we'll go to Commonplace Coffee Roasters for Coffee and then Allegro Hearth Bakery for breads.  With the items already in the "pantry" and what we're picking up we should be good for a few days on the trail.

Monday
Great Allegheny Passage, Day 1, 46 miles Pittsburgh-Roundbottom Campsite.
   Our plan was to leave Deep Creek at 8AM, we rolled out at 8:30, not bad.  With a couple stops wee made it to Pittsburgh at 11AM.
 The folks at Avis were cool and didn't charge me the extra day for being one hour late.  Lunch at S&D Deli was wonderful, Pierogis with mushroom & kraut, farmers cheese & potato, and cheddar & potato.  Inside there was a well stocked meat case, tons of dried and prepared, canned items..and then in the middle of the store as if to be a focal point, was the cooler.  A large chest cooler, with the lid open.  Inside were three, 5 gallon buckets, one had pickles, one had kraut, and one had pickled herring in brine, whole fillets.  It was all self serve, crazy.  I loved this place and can't wait to go back!  Our net stop was in Squirrel Hill, so we had some climbing to do, Pittsburgh is hilly as fuck!  Commonplace had good Espresso and the bag of Ethiopian we picked up was very nice.  Roasted just 7 days ago,  we were going to be drinking good on the trail.  Allegro Hearth Bakery was our last stop in town before bombing back down to the Youghiogheny River and our start of the GAP.  Here we found a batard, a chocolate brownie, apricot bar, and little foils of Kerry Gold Irish Butter, score!  The bread was nothing to write home about, but they were very nice and let us fill our bottles from their filtered water tap.  Thanks, Allegro!
  Only after we crossed the bridge and were looking up at it from below could we see how high up it was.  We both got a little chilled, it was an awesome descent but damn that thing looks scary from below.  The GAP is excellent so far!  All the campsites have Adirondack style shelters and fire pits, maintained by a local trail club.  Since we got a late start and our stops took a little longer than anticipated, we rolled into camp a little after dark.  We have pretty bright (300 lumen) lights so seeing wasn't an issue.  There were two other sites we passed along the way but it was too early to stop riding.  I felt it was important for us to make our miles on the first day and also it was beautiful out, especially at dusk.  So we counted down the mile markers until we saw the sign for Round Bottom and pulled into the empty campsite.  Another one with shelters!  We pulled our bikes into the shelter and pitched the tent in the middle to keep away from the dew in the morning.  It felt good to get our miles done, now we didn't have to do any making up of miles in the coming days.  We built up a nice fire and put our cans of soup around the edge, it felt good to be camping again.

Tuesday, October 18th
Roundbottom Campsite to Outflow Campground- 38 miles

With it being our first morning out, we decided to take it easy, not rushing out of our bags.  A nice morning of coffee and fig bars.  The water at Roundbottom was rather murky so we forewent the hot grits with ham and cheese.  I think we got rolling around noon, pretty late, but still plenty of time to cover the miles to Confluence.  Along the way we passed a lot of old mining sites and remnants of the steel industry.  Upon arriving at Outflow Campground we discovered that it was out of season, so no running water, no toilets, but also no fees.  Carrie set off into town in search of firewood while I prepared camp.  A sign on the road lead her to firewood for sale which ended up being large bundles of kindling, which worked great for making s'more skewers.   Shortly after she returned I set out to try and find water for that evening and the following morning.  I started riding towards lights, then kept following the lights as they got brighter.  Eventually I came to a grocery store.  I picked up a gallon of water and a bundle of firewood.  I didn't really expect to find everything in such plenty so I didn't account for securing the firewood to my bike.  The water fit in my rear bag, but I had to hold the wood on top of my front bag while I road back to camp.  It only got sketchy once on a short steep hill where it became very clear how much I use both arms in climbing.  I made it up the hill and was soon back to camp with all the water we needed and enough firewood roast a whole bag o' mallow!

plans; falling through and coming together

Light at the end of Pinkerton Tunnel
aka The Kissing Tunnel

   Somewhere along the Pacific Coast route, we began talking about what our next tour would be.  Would it be this long?  Would we fly again?  Would we be able to make it happen again?  The idea was to relocate and find work that we could settle into a little bit, sometimes that can make extended trips difficult.  Sometimes, it's not a problem at all.  After the PCH we did some festival catering work for the summer and fall, traveling around the mid-atlantic and up into Michigan.  All the while planning on returning to NC and settling in Asheville, where we were to have abundant opportunities to work and play.  I guess we were a few years behind the wave, housing was a mess, nothing available or affordable, so we looked around some more.  We ended up choosing Durham, and I'm glad we did.  So just before we moved everything out of "storage" and into the new place we tried for another small trip.  The Great Allegheny Passage and C & O Canal Towpath make up around 340 miles of traffic-less riding along several different rivers.  We would go to Baltimore for a few days, then head to Pittsburgh and ride down to DC.  Seemed simple, but a week before our departure Carrie had a crash.  We were riding around Durham one day trying to get a lay of the land, a feel for the place, learn some streets.  Washington is one to remember.  Carrie was riding along, i think she must have been looking off to the side when she hit a divot in the road, then another, next thing I saw was Carrie and her bike flipping over and landing in the middle of the street.  I rushed over, threw her bike to the curb, and helped her back to the sidewalk.  A hole in her shirt revealed a nasty bit of road rash, probably her first point of contact with the ground.   A couple small scrapes here and there, no head injuries.  I kept asking her questions about the crash and where we were.  She didn't know what made here crash, which makes sense as it threw here from the bike.  She did have a handle on where we were though, walking us directly back to the truck.  See, helmets are a good thing!  She had a week to heal before we were supposed to head back out for another tour, we were hopeful.  We held out for as long as going up to Baltimore for the start.  At least we could hang around the city and drink beer for a couple days.  Everything went down as it should have while in Baltimore, but Carrie still wasn't healed enough for a week on a trail.  So we stayed a couple extra days in Baltimore and then came back to NC, postponing the trip for a later date...
   Fast forward one year, Carrie's brother is getting married in western MD and Loaf will be closing for a week following the same weekend as the wedding.  I had just taken a job at Lucky's Deli when all of this unfolded.  I remember being nervous asking my new boss for 11 days off, I had no reason, he said it wouldn't be a problem, without an ounce of guilt put on me.  It was real now, we had the time off, we could now put together a plan.  
   We would drive 6 hours from Durham, NC to Deep Creek, MD for the wedding.  From there it was a 2 hour drive up to Pittsburgh to start the Great Allegheny Passage.