Day 9 The long and windy road

Blow me! Did it blow, from when I left Joe Paparo in West Lancaster, across the long span over the Susquehanna River and through York the wind blasted me, at times pushing the bike sideways a couple of feet. The sun shone but it was cold and uncomfortable, it took 58 minutes (not 59) for a cramp in my leg to demand a stop at a pizza shop, thankfully closed, to stretch and put on more layers.

Gettysburg was historic and a little spooky, monuments to the dead, cannons to show how they died, odd wooden fences that funnelled them to their deaths and re-enactors dressed up to show how they looked before they died. Nothing very civil about war.

The bike, I’ve never named a vehicle, yet, was running well although my confidence in its mechanical robustness is shaken so I treated her with kid gloves. There was a road closure, presumably due to a downed tree and the diversion led me down quiet lanes where isolated small houses with massive ‘yards’ nestled amongst the trees. If I saw one ride-on lawnmower I saw twenty, it seems to be a sport in these parts.

Not long after I stopped for a refreshingly trivial breakdown, the gear linkage fell apart, in Freedom township, not much to see there but the guys at the truck maintenance yard were friendly enough. The winding road ran through Catoctin Mountain Park and South Mountain State Park, I think they are part of the Appellations. I followed quiet country roads like this (Box Factory Road) down to Winchester:

In Winchester it didn’t take long to work out that the hotels were full and expensive so pausing only for a chat with Steve, who, like me, was watching the locomotives being marshalled (12 thousand horsepower each he said), I headed further down to Strasburg.

The road down offered promise of the treats to come, big rolling switchbacks and grand vistas, the two ranges of mountains extending in front of me on either side. It seemed like I was riding up between a giants legs lying under a green blanket, goodness knows what’s up ahead.

The featureless hotel shall remain nameless however, ‘Paladin’, an Iranian/Russian truck driver, with a penchant for World of Warcraft advised me over a cigarette to go further south to miss the weather, there is a lot of it about at the moment.