The Other Side (Blog)

Or at least half of it. This was a wonderful idea that Bill came up with to bike the most interesting part of the east coast in a relatively short time. The idea would be to start in Bar Harbor, and bike home. For Bill this would be a pickup near Philadelphia. For John and I, this would be Baltimore and Takoma Park.

Sadly, I was in poor shape (I blame it entirely on the collarbone I broke six weeks before the trip :-), and I bailed with knee and leg problems after two weeks. John and Bill lasted only two days longer before they succombed to despair over the loss of their spiritual leader.

We spent two weeks on the road. By the time my knee blew, we had ridden 675 miles in the August heat, and climbed over 34,000 feet (extensive study prior to the trip led me to believe that we'd climb 10-20 thousand feet in the entire trip :-(). Put another way, we climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest. We did a third more climbing than John and Bill did in their entire DC-to-Asheville ride down Skyline Drive and the Blueridge Parkway.

We finished the last week of the ride in May of 2012, going from Port Jervis, NY, to my driveway (except for John, who bailed miles and miles away).