Sur La Plaque!

Miles: 57
Miles so far: 361

The shakedown’s finished. We made it. Mission accomplished. Et cetera. Today started out like every other — wake up, discover everything you own is camp damp (not unlike “business drunk”), put on your best impression of Shaquille O’Neal emerging from a Fiat 500 as you climb out of your tent, trip over guyline,  make instant coffee, curse said instant coffee, drink it anyway, and realize somewhere in the process that life is grand and you’re on an adventure (typically while recalibrating expectations re: coffee’s insipidity).

Today was a lazy day. We weren’t on the road until a little after 9:30 a.m., and stopped for breakfast in Point of Rocks at a deli where the bold exterior color scheme was more interesting than the bagel sandwich. Think used-car lot-cum-moon bounce. Acres of trains passed as we ate, lording their victory over the 90-years-defunct canal.

Down the road we crossed the Monocacy River on the, wait-for-it, Monocacy Aqueduct! Finished in 1833, this 438-foot crossing was built with stone quarried out of nearby Sugarloaf Mountain. It’s a really pretty structure, all the more so when you consider it’s built in the middle of nowhere for utilitarian purposes. During the Civil War, the Union used the canal for troop and supply transport, which made it a common target for Confederate harassment. Intrepid C&O employee Thomas Walter persuaded attacking troops to drain the canal rather than destroy the more difficult to repair (and thus expensive) aqueduct. For this, he was briefly fired for collaborating with the enemy before his neighbors successfully petitioned for reinstatement.

Rather than follow the towpath to its Georgetown conclusion, we crossed the Potomac at White’s Ferry on the Gen. Jubal A. Early, the only still-operational ferry serving the public. Two dollars gets you across the river into Leesburg and the land of Lexus, where roads are paved with glorious asphalt and you rejoin the horseless carriage and traffic signals. Lunch was a nice NY-style pie at La Villa Roma, with pre-Bloomberg monster fountain sodas. Sometimes HFCS is just what the doctor ordered — time to show your pancreas who’s boss. We used the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad trail to transit Leesburg to Vienna, and then took secondary roads home to Suburbia. The W&OD was a shock to my system coming from the canal. It’s very road-like, paved, and with a center stripe down the middle to remind you to keep to yourself. It’s not quantifiable, but the closer to Washington we got, the less gregarious passersby seemed. In Meyersdale, Hancock or Sharpsburg, folks would say hi, or wave, or give you some kind of acknowledgement, whether on bicycle, foot, perched on a tractor or in a vehicle. I admit this is unfair, but the W&OD contained a much greater volume of folks out to simply fill their prescription for exercise — stoic and joyless in their pursuit of an elevated heart rate.

I’m glad to be home for a couple of days to relax and regroup,but I’m definitely not ready to call it quits. I guess that answers segment (a) of my Prologue I query. I have some ideas about (b) and (c), too.

Used-car lot-cum-moon bounce, the exterior was more entertaining than the bagel sandwich.

The aqueduct employs seven arches to cross the Monocacy river.

My first (and only) shakedown selfie.

Shore view.

Bike parking.

Look carefully in the upper right of the photo, and you can see a stone peeking out of its home.

The mules’ tow ropes wore grooves into this cast iron fencing at the beginning and end of the aqueduct.

Made a dragonfly friend at Monocacy Aqueduct.

This monster tree’s at least 200 years old. Check out the woman and dog at the left of the base for scale.

Welcome to White’s Ferry. It’s historic.

Our trusty ocean stead, the Jubal A. Early. It crosses the Potomac between White’s Ferry, Maryland, and Leesburg, Va. $5 for a car, but only $2 per bike.

There are several wineries in the Leesburg area. This one’s right off Route 15.

Pre-Bloomberg fountain soda. Yeah! It’s my pancreas, after all.

Rocks on rocks.

The W&OD provides a parallel gravel trail for horse traffic, but all traffic shares bridges and crossings.

Pittsburgh>Burke, completed.

Mileage: 58
Miles so far: 303

Today marked two records: My lowest average speed, 10.2 mph (lots of walking through washed-out and muddy towpath unfit for two-wheel consumption), and highest maximum speed, 32.5 mph (working my way back to the C&O from Antietam Battlefield), which is quite an accomplishment considering my bike’s about as aerodynamic as a chrome toaster. I try to ignore the computer on rides — just using it for total mileage and mileage between map turns (unnecessary when your only directive is southeast for 335 miles) — but I am tracking a few metrics and am curious to see how average speed changes as a function of my fitness and the terrain’s topography. Despite what the computer tells me, I felt faster. A day off, getting in bicycling shape, and dumping a little weight conspire with winning results.

Lots of historical action today. Just down the towpath from Four Locks is Williamsport, Maryland, which very nearly became the capital city when George Washington visited it before selecting D.C., about 100 miles to the east. A Williamsport ranger confirmed the towpath was open downstream, though till recently  it’d been closed with all of the recent rain. Rain and water played an integral role in the C&O’s development and use: damming the Potomac to ensure adequate water for transport, as well as engineering structures to protect from flooding. In fact, during the Civil War, parts of Robert E. Lee’s Northern Virginia Army found themselves isolated by a swollen, impassable Potomac. Only with some clever pontoon-bridge building did they escape to fight another day.

Past Williamsport, you enter Big Slackwater, an area of the Potomac ballooned by Dam No.4. Here, because of escarpments along the river’s edge, dynamite was needed blast the rock face open. Rather than blast enough room for the towpath and canal, architects decided to simply route the boats out of the canal, and into the Potomac here for four miles (MM 88-84), and just cleave a narrow strip for the mules to walk. So here, as in a couple of other places along the 184.5 miles, the canal is the river; the river is the canal. After the C&O closed in 1924, flooding and lack of maintenance destroyed the path, requiring visitors to detour along narrow country roads. In 2012, the park completed a two-year, $19-million project to reopen the original thoroughfare. So now you can ride along the river, which is much more pleasant, not to mention historically correct. The detour terminated (and still does, when the Potomac’s raging) at McMahon’s Mill, an attractive clapboard construction that generated flour via water power.

At Sharpsburg, we left the towpath behind for a while and pedaled up into town for a burger and beer at Captain Bender’s Tavern (Natty Boh!) and Nutter’s ice cream (official sponsor, 2014 Summer of David) before taking a look at Antietam Battlefield. Here, in September 1862, more than 22,000 Americans were killed, wounded or went missing. It’s the single bloodiest day in U.S. history. The park is colossal and somber — there are examples of cannon about — with rolling hills and acres of green grass, surrounded by farmland. The hills allowed for both sides to illustrate how gruesomely effective cannon could be in the field. Scattered throughout the battlefield are monuments to the casualties. Curiously, by state. During the 1860s, military dead and wounded were very much attributed to their home state, and not simply, the U.S. I grant that the Civil War was a special case, but back then people would be more likely to say, “I’m a Virginian,” or “I’m a New Yorker,” than “I’m an American.”

Past Antietam, and my aforementioned land speed record, it was back to pea gravel and mud. We went past Harper’s Ferry, but didn’t explore. I wasn’t keen on climbing a whole bunch of stairs with an 80-lb bike, and the town, while neat, is fairly touristy. So instead of a Harper’s Ferry anecdote, hear this: the Appalachian Trail crosses the Potomac from West Virginia into Maryland at Harper’s, and then follows the towpath for about three miles, before going its own way again, ala Stevie Nicks.

Home for the evening is Brunswick Family Campground. It’s commercial, but $5 a head buys hikers/bikers a hot shower, electricity, wifi and a place to set up a tent. Quite, too, though we stayed on a Sunday night. Dinner was fabulous falafel from Potomac Grill, where the food was excellent, and the service genuine. Tomorrow, home and the suburbs.

My dad and me Sunday morning. Blue skies.

The C&O company built a series of dams to ensure adequate water through the canal’s 184.5-mile run.

This old warehouse is Williamsport’s C&O visitor center. Here, we received confirmation the the towpath was open through Big Slackwater.

Once upon a time, National Bohemian a/k/a Natty Boh was Baltimore’s premier adjunct lager. Now owned by Pabst and brewed by MillerCoors, it’s perfect for a hot day. You can order a Boh-tini, where your pint glass’s rimmed with Old Bay. Exactly what you’d expect, and exactly what I needed.

A collection of guns: the copper cannons are smoothbore; the cast iron, rifled.

Acres of rolling hills and win rows.

The towpath goes right past Harper’s Ferry. You have to cross the Potomac to reach it (and West Virginia). We passed, but these trains certainly won’t.

Starting in Harper’s Ferry, for about three miles the Appalachian Trail parallels the towpath. Harper’s Ferry’s a rough midpoint on the 2,100-plus mile Georgia-to-Maine trail.

Home for the evening. Very close to New Brunswick (née, Barry, oddly enough) CSX depot, but not sleep-snatchingly so.