Mind The GAP!

TOP: John readies his steed for battle. Note that the mountain bike dwarfs the Mini Cooper.
2nd: Lumpy and John at starting marina in McKeesport, PA
3rd: Mark and his date
4th: The Youghiogheny river rapids
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My latest adventure is a bike trip on a rail trail called the GAP-C&O. It is a conglomeration of the Great Allegheney Passage along the Youghiogheny and Castleman Rivers, and then in Cumberland MD transitioning to the canal bed of the C&O canal all the way to Washington, DC.
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As a wee bit of history, the C&O canal was the canal that Washington and the "southerners" tried to build along the potomac to cross the eastern continental divide and open up "the west". At the same time the construction of the Erie Canal in New York was going on, and, as we all know, it ended up getting built and became the primary gateway to the US interior and New York City the primary port, until the advent of the railroads. The C&O kept getting destroyed by spring floods, had funding issues, and eventually was overtaken by the railroad system paralleling it (still a major rail corridor as we found out every night at 3am).
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Two friends accompanied me on the trip, Mark Lutterbien, and old swimming friend from probably 20 years back in Rochester, and John Coble, a San Diego buddy now living in DC. We rendezvous'd in McKeesport PA, just outside Pittsburgh, and being the smallest guy, I got to spend a lovely evening sleeping in a courdoroy recliner, next to an open window, alongside a major truck freeway, on a 3o degree night. Last time I ask them to join me on anything... I shut the window and melted them at 4am. Lumpy like heat...and quiet...
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We left early monday morning from McKeesport marina, a surprisingly nice piece of real estate, in a sadly depressed town. McKeesport was a "big steel" town...now it's populated with empty steel mills, crumbled buildings, glass-strewn lots, and potholed streets. It's a sad thing to see, and the people there were obviously struggling just to get by. We spoke with some police officers (who couldn't have been any nicer to a bunch of lycra-clad white bread cyclists), and the waitresses at the diner. Everyone seemed resigned to their fate.
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The trip topography is basically 120 miles very gradual uphill (1-2%), 30 miles bit steeper downhill (2-4%), and then a flat run to the finish. The trail texture alternated between crushed stone, gravel, dirt, moderate mud, sand, and pavement. A fun ride, not to stressful, but 330 miles in 3 1/2 days of riding; enough to get the juices flowing.
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"Did I say 120 miles of uphill" Lumpy out