Over the Hills to Ithaca

Tired greetings from our home away from home, Ithaca, where we are staying with Louise's daughter Lisa and her family. We biked 9 straight days from Princeton here, our longest stretch of consecutive biking days, but that wasn't what wore us down on the way here. No, it was the hills, lots of them, in fact lots of big ones. There's something about getting down into your lowest gear, grinding to the top of a steep hill and, just as you are about to congratulate yourself on making it to the top, seeing another hill beyond, higher and steeper-looking than the one you're on! Well, we had that experience almost every day on this leg of the trip! So the emblematic image of the past week is this one of Jeff using the "28th gear" on our 27-speed bike, walking.
Which we also did almost every day of the past week, sometimes more than once. Hey, it's about comfort, not pride.

Perhaps it was also the shock of hills after four months with an almost complete absence of them. The route we took through Florida, GA, SC, NC, VA, MD, DE and southern NJ was almost dead-flat, and we only used our granny gear (the small chainring that gives you really low gears for climbing) three times until last week, two of them large bridges in Georgia and a single steep hill in Virginia. But once we hit those New Jersey hills, we were into it constantly.

Our route went from Princeton to the Delaware River, then up that river along the NJ-PA border to Port Jervis, where NY, NJ and PA come to a point. We expected the Delaware Water Gap to be both hilly and spectacular as we cut through the heart of the Appalachian Mountain chain, but in fact the Gap itself was wide enough for the road to avoid major climbs, and no one spot caught the drama of the river cutting through. It was quite beautiful, however,
and almost 100 miles of our route both before and after the Water Gap were on small roads like this one near the river, or this second one that Jeff is again taking in that "28th gear."
By the way, that cloud of white near him is indeed dogwood in bloom. We've now been following it northward for 2 1/2 months.

From Port Jervis we continued to follow the Delaware, which forms the border between NY and PA for about 100 miles. This was the hardest part of the trip, as the river has little floodplain and the road wanders up and down as it more-or-less follows the river. We had a beautiful view down to the river from a pullout seen here,
but also a preview of the climb to come.
Whew! By the second day of roller-coaster riding, going 40+ mph down a hill only to be climbing the next one a minute or two later at 6 mph, or walking, we came to an easy decision: two of the panniers had to take a summer vacation in Ithaca!

When we weren't panting up hills, we rode along discussing what we had in our panniers that we could live without in order to go from 4 panniers down to 2. By the time we leave Ithaca, we will be in "New England hill mode" with no more stove, titanium pots, binoculars, rain pants, and various items of clothing, and will have switched to thinner, lighter sneakers in place of our GoreTex waterproof walking shoes. Don't think that will entirely keep us out of 28th gear, but it should minimize it and get us over the hills a bit less exhausted. We'll try to keep the number of books down as well -- at times back in the flat lands we had 4 and even 5 after hitting particularly good used book stores or libraries with good book sales. We may even go back to reading the same book, with the first person tearing off sections of the book for the second person to read. And if all that isn't enough, we may have to do something drastic like lose weight ourselves!

One day before hitting Ithaca, we reached familiar territory, Binghamton NY. We biked here on a 3-day jaunt last Fall, and we knew the route "home." It wasn't quite as hilly as the previous 7 days, and familiarity in this instance bred contentment. We were almost there!
The last night out we tried something new, staying at a Tandem Club of America "Hospitality Home" with Roy and Laurie, who shared tandem experiences with us over this dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant. It was a good visit, and we're hoping to visit two or three more hospitality homes in the coming weeks.


It's good to be back with family for a week of R&R, and it's been our first major relaxing since early January -- no historic sites or nature trails to visit, just catching up on sleep, playing with two grandchildren, enjoying Lisa and Ray's gourmet home cooking, and doing lots of trip planning for the coming three months
with a borrowed laptop. On our second day here we biked to grandaughter Hanachan's day care and were her "Show and Tell" exhibit.
The kids got a big kick seeing such a large bike, and one with two seats! The bell and the flashing rear light were big hits as well, with all the 3- to 5-year olds wanting a turn to play with them.

We're still working on the tentative route for the summer,
but we have made a reservation for a VIA train leaving Halifax NS on Labor Day (actually Labour Day in Halifax) that will take us to Kingston ON, at the east end of Lake Ontario. From there it's a 5-day ride back to Ithaca, where we will reshuffle the equipment, disassemble the bike into two suitcases, and take off on Amtrak for Los Angeles with a 4-day stop in Austin to see Jeff's daughter Becky and her family. We'll arrive in LA one day before our sailing on the Holland-America Volendam to Aukland New Zealand, where we'll reassemble the tandem for still more adventures.

But that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. Our goal for the next three months is to see New England and the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia in depth and to visit several friends along the way, with our newly-lightened tandem. We look forward to sending you more reports about every 10-14 days.

Weather and Whither

The past 2 weeks have been dominated by two issues: the weather and trip planning. We had 2 days of waiting out rain all day, 3 days of near misses, and 2 soakings. On trip planning we succeeded after much effort in working out our route to Ithaca and, much harder, finding lodging that was available and would not also subject us to a soaking of sorts.

We left you in Berlin MD. We stayed in our B&B 'til the last moment before checkout time and succeeded in missing the morning showers and in beating the next round to Ocean City, our destination.
Ocean City has a boardwalk, like Virginia Beach to the south and like every city and town on the Delaware (i.e., both of them) and Jersey shores. It was wider and more bike-friendly than many, and of average tackiness. Further north was a row of condos that reminded us of the statues on Easter Island,
gazing forlornly out at the ocean. It was still 2 weeks before Memorial Day, and the beach was empty and the condos nearly so. We found a chain motel not far from the public library and spent the rest of the day and all of the next (while it was raining) on the library computers trying to find a place that would watch our tandem for one day the following week while we took a train in to NYC. The Princeton Holiday Inn came to our rescue after many others declined, and we'll tell you more further down about that side trip.

Our next overnight was in Rehoboth Beach, which we'd heard was quite nice. It did have a nice beach and boardwalk and a large neighborhood of gorgeous homes near the beach, but the only motel we could afford was tucked between two outlet malls out on the highway.
The town of Lewes DE (pronounced "Lewis") was a very pleasant surprise, with over a dozen 18th century houses and even this one that dates to the 1660s. In Lewes we picked up the ferry
across the mouth of the Delaware to Cape May, where ocean swell coming upriver gave us sea legs in our 80 minute crossing. Rain was again chasing us, but we managed to see the lighthouse, bike along the 2-mile seawall, check into
the impressive Inn of Cape May, walk past
dozens and dozens of beautiful B&Bs that rent rooms for $150-300 a night even in the off season, and even have dinner before the rain came.

The first drops were literally as we approached the Inn. Within an hour it was a full-blown humdinger of a Nor'easter. Our room was on the windward side of the Inn, and the 40-60 mph wind found its way through the window frame to rustle the curtains in our room. We emerged only to walk, tilted to the wind, two blocks to the library the next day, back for lunch, then back to the library. By late afternoon it abated enough for our friends Jim and Anita, the boaters we've been tag-teaming up the coast, to catch a taxi from their marina out of town in to our Inn to join us in the dining room for dinner.
They told a wild story of riding out the storm surge at high tide that morning at 4, when the water rose above the wharf they were tied up to, and that we're standing on the next day when we stopped by to see them on our way out of town. It's convenient having your kitchen and bedroom always available, but we're not so sure we would enjoy the bouncing that comes with that convenience, particularly when the weather is as rough as that!

We were worried about the ride north the next day, as there was supposed to be a 20-30 mph headwind,
but somehow or other it never seemed that strong except in this one spot where the surf made for an exciting ride. All in all, we had a pleasant ride along the Jersey shore, jumping from barrier island to barrier peninsula to barrier island. One of them, Wildwood NJ,
had a most unusual lighthouse shown here, but the waterfront had otherwise been despoiled by the tackiest boardwalk yet, an unremitting wall of ugly buildings you wouldn't buy dog food from let alone the fried and sugary concoctions they were trying to hawk.
But Ocean City NJ made up for it with a beautiful boardwalk that stretched 3 miles from a residential area to the south to the small and remarkably clean-looking cluster of shops and small-scale amusement parks to the north.
We found a motel pressed up against the boardwalk where we could see the waves from our room. Ah, this is what we've been biking up the coast to find!!!


At last we said goodbye to the coast just before Atlantic City, seen in the distance here, and headed inland with no plans to see saltwater for a month. As we left the coast, we saw dogwood blossoms. Hey, we posted a photo two months ago of dogwood blossoms buried under Spanish Moss in
Beufort SC, then a month ago in Virginia Beach VA. We have been following Spring north, even though the temperatures have been largely in the 50's and 60's since leaving Florida, not the 70's we'd hoped for! We stopped for a visit to two relics of the past, the ruins of Hopewell Furnace and the restored village of Batsto,
both of which turned bog iron into cast iron stoves and kettles and, during the Revolution, cannons and cannon balls, both of which had spent their careers by the mid-19th century.

And then the weather turned again. We woke up to a steady rain and decided that getting drenched was preferable to hanging out in Pemberton NJ, where the B&B was almost 2 miles from the only real restaurant in town and there was no library to retreat to. Half-way to Princeton and quite thoroughly moistened, shall we say, we weren't so sure we'd done the calculation correctly, but it was a bit late for that. We stopped in a trendy-looking coffee house to revive ourselves for the last 10 miles of our 40-mile slosh, and one of the employees came out a few minutes later to mop up the rather large puddle where we had landed. But make it we did, and the Holiday Inn had a guest laundry where, minutes after arrival, a large portion of our clothing was awash in suds.

Thanks to Holiday Inn agreeing to hold our bike for a day and night while we were gone and to frequent-sleeper points from a motel chain, we had an interesting trip on a New Jersey Transit train to the Big Apple.
Louise's son Brian had a gig at the Buddhist Church of New York with his group, the Happy Fun Smile Band. We had seen photos of Brian and his band in action, but seeing, hearing, feeling it was something else again. Brian is lead male singer, and emcee and primal energy source for the group. At one point this nominally Okinawan band struck up a waltz and Brian came down the hall to dance with his Mom.
Later they did a Japanese Obon Odori dance that looks a lot like the hokey-pokey. It was so much fun to see them at last! We spent the rest of the afternoon
with Brian and with Louise's brother Richard, who also lives in New York, then spent the night at the Eastside Ramada in midtown. Good thing we weren't paying, it would have been $230 for a very small, rather plain room. New York is a great place to visit, but wow is it pricey. Next day we had lunch with Brian and experienced $14 sandwiches which looked remarkably like some $6 sandwiches we've had earlier on the trip.

We left Princeton hoping to beat the rain once more. No such luck. For the morning, however, it was intermittent and so light that we did not even bother with rain jackets for a while. Hey, we're from Seattle! No bigee! We reached the D&R (Delaware and Raritan) Canal at Washington Crossing NJ
-- yup, where Washington crossed the Delaware to catch those sleeping Hessian soldiers on Christmas morning 1776, roughly where the camera is looking from the bridge that wasn't there then -- and the canal path was a pleasant alternative to the busy shoulderless road nearby.
As it went along the Delaware, still a fairly large river here, the trail morphed into a railtrail, and we found a wonderful lunch spot in a restored train depot. But the rain gathered force and became a steady pour not unlike the day into Princeton, and we had another wet one. Fortunately, it was only 5 more miles to our destination, and we had the trail to ourselves.

When we made reservations for the Stockton Inn, we had no idea we'd been hearing about it for years from two of the icons of American musical theater,
Rogers and Hart. This is the small hotel of the song that goes "There's a small hotel, with a wishing well, wishing we were there, together..." The dining room dates to 1711 but with charming idealized scenes of the locale painted during the Depression by artists trading their art for room and board. When the owner saw how bedraggled we were on check-in, he upgraded us to a gorgeous suite where we soon had everything out on hangers. What a fitting way to end this segment, drying off and looking forward to our last push to Ithaca.
Indeed, the rain ended about the time we had dinner, and we got this moody picture of the Delaware just after sunset.

We have 7 days to go now to reach Ithaca, following the Delaware for the first 5 of them along NJ-PA border to Port Jervis and then the NY-PA border toward Binghamton. We'll talk to you next from there!

Up the Eastern Shore

We are now on the Eastern Shore, aka the DelMarVa peninsula, heading from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the mouth of the Delaware. We crossed the former by means of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (the CBBT), and will get across the latter by ferry from Lewes DE to Cape May NJ.

This part of our trip has been reworked more than any other. The original plan was to bike to Reedville VA, 80 miles north of Williamsburg, and take a ferry from there to Tangier Is. in the middle of Chesapeake Bay and then a second ferry from Tangier to the Eastern Shore. Turns out the ferry doesn't begin its season until 2 weeks from now.

Then we decided to bike back to Norfolk and take the Bridge-Tunnel. The CBBT Authority will carry bicyclists over by pick-up truck, the cyclists just have to pay the
$12 toll. However, we did not love our route from Norfolk to Williamsburg two weeks ago, so we planned a different route back via Suffolk that was a bit longer but put us on back roads for almost an entire day.

Then that plan had to go. Four days before we would have set out for Suffolk, a tornado went through. 50 houses and businesses totalled, 100 seriously damaged, 300 others somewhat damaged, and the road we planned to take goes right through the heart of the disaster zone! So we took our earlier route in reverse, and it went OK, since this time we were mentally prepared for the narrowness of the roads and the traffic that had to be endured.

Crossing the CBBT was interesting!
It opened in 1964 and was expanded in 1999, and will begin another expansion from 2011 to 2017. It goes 17.6 miles from shore to shore, with 12 miles of trestled roadway, two truss bridges, four man-made islands and two tunnels, each one a mile long. The tunnels allow ocean-going vessels of any height to enter the Chesapeake heading either to Hampton Roads to the south or
towards Baltimore to the north. You can see the roadway disappearing for the more northerly of the two tunnels in this picture, particularly if you click on the photo to enlarge it.

Best part of the CBBT was that it put us on the Eastern Shore. This has been FANTASTIC biking country! We have been almost entirely on quiet country roads like
this one en route to Modest Town VA (that's it's name -- seems a nearby town was known a while back as "Hell Town," and this one got a contrasting nickname that stuck). The roads have been flat, scenic and devoid of traffic. On top of that, we've had tail winds for most of our four days of riding northward. This is Biker Heaven!

We stayed at two nice B&Bs in small towns on the bay side of the peninsula, then in a small apartment in a motel in Chincoteague, near the ocean, that is more like a resort, but at modest off-season prices. Today we're in another small town, Berlin Maryland, and once again in a B&B. Over the next few days we'll see Maryland's tiny Atlantic Ocean shoreline, much of it covered by touristy Ocean City, and all of Delaware's, also quite short (each state has about 30 miles of ocean frontage).


En route here we stopped at Eyre Hall, an extensive plantation that we biked a full mile to reach on a ruler-straight entry road lined with cedar trees on both sides, with verdant fields of wheat stretching out parallel to the road. The white clapboard plantation house is set back a short distance from Chesapeake Bay and has been in the same family for 250 years.
The garden is open to all, but not publicized. Our B&B put us on to it, and it was stunning. The highlight is the old
family burial grounds and the ruins of the orangerie, a brick greenhouse that once was used to grow orange and lemon trees. The garden was a series of "rooms" set off by hedges and trees, each one the size of a small house.
It was well worth the side-trip.

Chincoteague Island is on the Atlantic side of the peninsula, in Virginia just below the Maryland line. We had to ride a narrow causeway to get there. After a rest day we rode without our luggage further east to Assateague Island, which is directly on the Atlantic. Assateague is entirely preserved, part as a National Seashore and part
comprising a National Wildlife Refuge. We've both grown up thinking of islands as land surrounded by water. Islands along the Atlantic are frequently much more complex, with large areas within the island covered by either seawater or freshwater, as they are rarely more than a few feet above sea level. Assateague was like that, as you can see in one shot of some distant Sika Elk, an asian species that was introduced to the island some years ago,
or another of some resting waterfowl on a tidal lagoon.

Assateague however is most famous for ponies that have run wild here for well over a century.
Misty of Chincoteague is a well-known children's book and movie that dramatizes the annual round-up and auctioning off of wild ponies. It started as a money-maker to fund a local volunteer fire department in the 1920's, and immediately became an annual event that now draws tens of thousands to see the ponies driven at low tide across the channel between Assateague and Chincoteague Islands. There were several miles of paved bike trails that gave us great viewing of waterfowl and of the ponies. The pony to the left appeared to be the boss of this herd,
watching guard while the rest of the gang had lunch.

As promised in our last blog, here is a map of the rest of our route to Ithaca and tentative plans for our exploration of New England.
We haven't yet decided whether we will leave Ithaca via the Erie Canal route or by reversing our route from Port Jervis to Ithaca, but those are the two main contenders. We definitely want to see the Hudson Valley, then head toward Hartford to see a variety of friends, including at least two couples we've met on this trip. Our idea is then to island-hop to see the eastern end of Long Island, Block Island, Martha'a Vineyard and Nantucket, trying to avoid the narrow roads and hordes of tourists in lower Cape Cod by taking a ferry from Provincetown to Plymouth. We'll probably swing wide to the west around Boston, but otherwise stay relatively close to the coast from Salem Massachusetts on to the north.

We need to be back in Ithaca by September 8 or so, and have not yet decided how we'll get from Maine there -- possibly over the White, Green and Adirondack Mtns., possibly by taking the ferry to Nova Scotia, biking to Halifax then taking the train to a point north of Ithaca. Stay tuned!

Off the Bike and Back Two Centuries

We last left you two weeks ago at a B&B in Portsmouth VA built in 1784. We have been largely in the 18th century since. But first we paid a visit to Jim and Anita, our new friends who have been boating up the Intracoastal Waterway parallel to us. We met them at Dafuskie Island, then ran into them by chance in Georgetown SC.
This time we had a planned reunion at their boat, which just happened to be moored near our B&B! Jim prepared a great scallop dinner, we added wine, and a good time was had by all as they say.

We next biked two days to the northwest, to Williamsburg. The route scared us, but Jeff found someone who posted a bike commute on www.bikely.com that used the roads we needed to take (without a very lengthy detour, that is). We admire that person's courage if he/she truly commutes on those roads. We got through safely, but they were challenging due to narrow or nonexistent shoulders and a fair bit of traffic. Virginia may be for lovers, but not for bike lovers.
As we got close to Jamestown we did get on this lovely country road, one of the first actually since we have been largely on the coast, where you just don't get "away from it all" like here.

In Williamsburg we locked up our bike at the Alice Person House B&B and walked to the train station to meet
Jim and Nancy Schoepflin. This photo is NOT at that train station but rather at Union Station in DC, more about that later. For the next 5 days the four of us basked in the 18th century
at Williamsburg, 3 days there plus one day each at Jamestown and at Yorktown. And had one foray into more recent history with the most astonishing coincidence yet, which we'll also get to down further. Jim and Nancy are not bikers, so we had a pedestrian two weeks. The B&B, however, was anything but pedestrian. It's a large comfortable and attractive place, and Jean the innkeeper went above and beyond with things like storing our tandem and panniers while we went to Washington DC, ferrying us over to Williamsburg, and entertaining us at breakfast with hilarious stories. She's "Exhibit A" for why we like B&Bs.


The four of us agreed afterwards that 5 days was a good amount of time to see all we wanted to see without OD'ing on history. We particularly liked the dramatizations at Williamsburg, including both music and
yet more musket and cannon-firing but also an intriguing little love story, played out in three 20-minute mini-dramas in different buildings around the town, showing how the revolution affected even that area of life
(her dad was a patriot, his dad a wealthy Loyalist who eventually left for England -- without the son, who became a patriot and later Washington's first Attorney General).

Jamestown was surprisingly interesting, particularly the museum built by the National Park Service to house artifacts and skeletons unearthed in just the past dozen years. It was astonishing to see what forensic scientists could deduce about the deceased from the bones and traces of clothing,
such as buttons and pins, that they found (e.g. lots of buttons meant all the clothes were left on, which meant death of an infectious disease, as nothing was removed from the body before burial). The State also has a museum in Jamestown that was equally captivating, including full-size replicas of the boats that brought over the settlers. This was the LARGEST of the three boats!

Yorktown was so interesting that Louise and Jeff came back by bike a week later and rode a dozen miles on gorgeous one-way roads
through the battlefield and to this quiet field where 7500 British soldiers laid down their arms in 1781.



Earlier with Jim and Nancy we explored the area where the British had essentially boxed themselves in. When the French Navy successfully fought off a British rescue mission, Cornwallis found it "quite annoying" as one diarist described it, with cannon balls falling all over town. The so-called Clinton Building had two of them still there, one up high and the one in close-up about as high above the ground as a man's head. Boy, one of those could really ruin your day!

After our 5 days in the "Historic Triangle," the four of us took off by Amtrak to Richmond for 2 days and Washington DC for 5 more. We found downtown Richmond interesting, particularly the State House and the Confederate White House (actually never white but rather grey, then and now), where President Jeff Davis lived until Grant was about to enter town. He headed south (of course!) hoping to reach South America but was captured. The Museum of the Confederacy nextdoor showed a popular cartoon showing Jeff Davis captured in women's clothing,

but insisted that this was a misunderstanding by newspaper reporters, and asserted that this outfit was in fact what he was wearing. Gee, can't a politician do a little cross-dressing now and then without someone trying to cover it up?


After exploring the recently rebuilt canal around the rapids that led to Richmond's founding at the fall line, we continued on to DC. We had sent to Williamsburg a suitcase with clothes we took to Austin for Becky's wedding in January, and

here we are at the Kennedy Center in clothes we normally don't have with us on bike trips! We heard a great concert featuring Saint-Saens' 4th Piano Concerto, and Jeff enjoyed seeing this magnificent facility for the first time.


After the concert we went on to Alexandria and next day went with Jim and Nancy to the Metropolitan Opera (yes, that Met up in New York City), in the form of a simulcast screening in a movie theater. The Met has signed up 700+ theaters around the globe for 8 performances this season, 11 next season, and we strongly urge the known or potential opera lovers among you to check this out. The price was an affordable $20/ticket, and the surround sound was almost as good as in person. The close-ups of the singers made the drama of the opera come alive, and we LOVED the performance! It helped, of course, that the female lead in Donizetti's comic opera La Fille du Regiment was a great comic who had us rolling with laughter as well as enchanted with the singing.


We also explored the old part of Alexandria, and were astonished. It was gorgeous! It has as much 18th century architecture as Williamsburg, or so it seems, but in a vibrant living city. Of course no costumed interpreters, and lots of "modern" stuff from the early and mid-1800s, but it was an interesting contrast and complement to
our week in Williamsburg. We closed out our stay in Washington with 2 days at the home of Louise and Masaharu Shimizu, Louise's best friend from their years together in Tokyo. It was great to catch up on our respective families. On our way back to Amtrak to return to Williamsburg, we stopped at the National Museum of American Art and caught a beautiful special exhibit of the work of little-known artist Chiura Obata. This is one of his lush watercolors-turned-woodprint that he painted in Yosemite in the 1920's.


And what was that about an astonishing coincidence? We know Jim and Nancy through Jeff's former job as an attorney for the University of Washington and Nancy's as the equivalent at Washington State University. On day 2 at our B&B a couple arrived in the evening and Jeff discovered that the husband (we'll call him "John") went to his alma mater and that the wife ("Jean") was from Seattle. The next day our group of 4 plus John, Jean and their 12-year-old daughter were sitting around the breakfast table when Jean mentioned that she had gone to the University of Washington. Louise and Jeff said that they had just retired from jobs there. When Jean asked where we had worked, Jeff said the Attorney General's Office. Jean replied that she was once married to someone from that office.

Jeff, Louise and Nancy looked intently at her to hear who. She named someone we'll call "Jay," who spent 10 years in the office DIRECTLY next to Jeff's, and who had regular email exchanges with Nancy over legal issues both handled at our respective institutions! Problem is, "Jay" separated from his wife "Jane" several years ago, and Jean was clearly not "Jane" (whom Jeff and Louise knew well) or the woman "Jay" ran off with! We sat there speechless, trying to comprehend this (and quite failing...) when Jean finaly said, "It was quite a while ago, when we were in our early twenties." In unison, Jeff and Louise said, wide-eyed, "You mean "Jay" was married to someone else before "Jane"!!!

Well, it's time to head north to see who else we can run into, or failing that to return to Ithaca. From here we bike to Norfolk over 2 days and get a lift from the bridge authorities across the tunnel-bridge that spans the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. That will put us on the DelMarVa peninsula and on the road ultimately back to Ithaca, which we hope to reach by the end of May. We'll say more about our route there and then from Ithaca to New England in our next post.