Over a year ago, we planned on riding the C&O/GAP bikeway from Pittsburg to Washington DC again, this time hopefully to finish the whole thing. Last time, a mechanical issue with Chris’ rented bike caused injury to Chris’ knee forcing us to abandon the last couple days of the bike part of the trip and rent a car to get us into DC. That trip was in May 2019.
This time, we’ll be doing the trip with the Coopers. John Cooper and I went to high school together and now his wife Terri will join Chris and me on this 343 mile bike ride, using the GAP bikeway and then the C&O Canal Path route to take us into Washington DC on basically all trails with no cars. We will be riding for 7 days which equates to about 50 miles a day. There’s not a lot of elevation gain.
One difference this trip is that Chris and I are taking the train from Denver to Chicago, meeting the Coopers and then all of us will take the train to Pittsburg for the start of the ride.
Last time, we flew to Pittsburg and rented bikes. This time we took our own bikes on the train booked a sleeper for both legs of the trip, which includes all meals in a dining car. Amtrak is certainly not the Orient Express or European trains in terms of luxury or attention to detail, but we have talked about doing a train trip across America for a while and so we decided to do it. Sadly, we found that everything Amtrak including service, food, staff are lacking. We made it work, but we’ll fly next time. 🙂
We are staying in hotels this trip, so we are taking smaller bags with just clothes, minimal tools and toiletries. Chris can take her super light carbon gravel bike and I removed the racks from my bike and am taking less stuff. The weather forecast includes some cold wet weather so we are bringing warm clothes and rain gear.
Our next planned bike trip after coming back from this one will be in New Zealand for a couple months starting in mid-January 2023 and we’ll be using bikepacking gear there so this is good practice. We’ll be camping in New Zealand so carrying more stuff than this trip but hopefully less than when crossing Europe.
Leave a Reply