From May 27 to May 31, 2010, my son, Yile, and I took a 300 miles bike ride from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. The bike trail consists of two parts: the Great Allegheny Passage (150 miles) and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C & O Canal, 184.5 miles).
We started at McKeesport and reached Connellsville 2 hours later.
We liked the bridges on the Great Allegheny Passage trail.
Over look at the Youghiogheny River from a bridge
Bridge to the Ohiopyle State Park
Wild flowers on the trail
At the end of the first day, after 70 miles of bike ride, we stayed in a campsite in Rockwood, PA, a very small town with less than 1,000 people. The campsite is right by the trail. There isn’t any facility on the campsite. But the guess house which charges $50 per person has shower, internet free for us camper to use. We went to a local bar called Rock City Cafe and ordered two beers and a dozen of chicken wings. Everything was fine until we were back to the campsite only to find out that trains were passing our campsite every 30 minutes. As we just got used to the train, and start getting into our sleep, a siren within less than 100 yard of our tent cried out. That’s the loudest sound I ever heard.
Nevertheless, we managed to sleep between trains and sirens. We got up 5:30 the next morning, packed everything and start to ride again around 6:30 with our eyes half open. Then we heard this weird loud bird sound. Yile turned his head and yelled out “mom, look, peacock!” I looked and saw this beautiful peacock on the top of a silo.
Take a close look at him
We passed the Casselman River and arrived at Meyersdale, PA, a bigger town
We had our breakfast at a local dinner, companied by people at least 70 years old. The cook, an old man, made a smiley face pancake for my omelet. After sign on their biker’s book, we left the restaurant. As we rode back to the trail, I told Yile to go ahead while I set up the GPS. Just then, a train rolled through the railway between us. It was a long train, more than 100 cars. We waited for more than 5 minutes before we saw each other. A runner passed by and joke with Yile “she didn’t make it, did she?”
We continued on our trip passing this beautiful bridge
We’ve been riding uphill from the beginning, for over 80 miles. Then we saw this overpass saying “Eastern Continental Divider – Leaving the Gulf of Mexico Watershed, Entering the Chesapeake Bay Watershed”
Yile got into the tunnel first and cried out “Mom, come and see! This is the happiest map I’ve ever seen”.
We’ve ridden more than 100 miles and reached the highest point on our trip. From now on, it’ll be all downhills.
There are many tunnels in that section of the trail and most of them were built in 1911.
There are benches like these all the way along the Great Allegheny Passage Trail. Yile loves them.
We rode across the “Mason – Dixon line” which symbolized a cultural boundary between the northern and the southern United States, regarded as the division between free and slave states before the Civil War.
A beautiful farm house not far from the trail
At noon, we arrived at Cumberland, MD, the end of the Great Allegheny Passage and the start of the C&O Canal. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park is 184.5 miles of adventure. Originally, the C&O Canal was a lifeline for communities and businesses along the Potomac River as coal, lumber, grain and other agricultural products floated down the canal to market. It didn’t serve its original goal very well because of the development of the rail road system along its side.
The Paw Paw Tunnel is a 3,118 feet (950 m) long canal tunnel in Maryland on the C&O Canal, which was built to bypass the Paw-Paw bends, a six-mile stretch of the Potomac River containing five horseshoe bends. Construction on the tunnel began in 1836, and the tunnel was not completed until 1850.
There is no light inside the tunnel. We had to use our headlamp and rode very carefully between pod holes on the narrow muddy path. It was a challenging ride.
It started to rain when we exited the tunnel. But just as we set our rain gears up, the rain stopped and that was the only rain we had in our four day ride.
There wasn’t much going on along the trail from Cumberland, MD and Little Orleans, WV. We set up our tent on a river bank campsite, only few yards from the water. It was a well deserved quiet night after an 85 mile ride.
We woke up before 6am and hit the trail again right after 6. Fifteen minutes later, we reached the Little Orleans Campground which is on the boarder of Maryland and West Virginia. The campground were filled with farmer looked people. Most of them had the confederacy flag on their sites. We used the bathroom and found most of the campers drove to the bathroom even their campsites were less than 100 yards away. Cross the trail, there was a store/restaurant called Bill’s Place. We walked into a dark room through an unlocked door. A middle aged man came down to meet us and turned on the lights. We woke him up. We asked for breakfast. He said they don’t serve breakfast but he can make some coffee for us. While the coffee was made, one by one the rest of the family showed up. Bill, a 70-80 years old man started to tell us about the history of his store after hooked himself to an oxygen tube. I guess since we were such a good audience, he asked us if we want some sandwiches. Yile said yes. Bill’s daughter-in-law made Yile a good egg ham sandwich. Bill said he build his store 40 years ago by the canal but had to move the building (we didn’t ask how) because of the rail road. That building was burned down on the election day of 2000. He had to build the current one. The walls were filled with old pictures and the ceiling was covered with dollar bills. After Yile finished his sandwich, we thanked the old man for his stories and resumed our journey.
3, 4 miles from Bill’s place, a 22 mile paved bike trail called Western Maryland Railroad Trail was laid beside of the old trail. We took the easy trail and speeded up. Then Yile found this big, slow guy on the trail.
Dam #5
An owl flew over our heads and landed on a branch of a tree next to the trail
We reached Williamsport, MD around noon. At the C&O visitor center, a woman asked Yile if he can raise the seat of her son’s bike because she didn’t realize how much the boy has grown. Yile took out his tool kit (that was the only time he used them for our trip) started working on that boy’s bike. As Yile raising the seat, the grandma said “look, he is just growing in front of our eyes!”
Around 6 O’clock, we reached Harpers Ferry, WV, a historical town. It is situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers where the U.S. states of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia meet.
The Appalachian Trail (AT) and the C&O Canal Trail join together along the river. I’ve always wanted to hike this section of AT, but I didn’t expect that one I would bike on it.
Our shelter for the night was the fertility of Hostel International in Harpers Ferry. The GPS showed the building was few hundred yards away from the trail but in reality, we had to carry our bikes across the canal and the rail road to the foot of a very big hill to ask about directions. A typical West Virginia fellow with several teeth missing from his mouth answered Yile and pointed the right side of the uphill road say “it’s up there on the left”. We looked at each other and thanked him. The hill was so deep that I had to push my bike up there. Sweat was all over me when I reached the hostel. A very hippie looking young man hosted us. He showed us the fertility. When I asked him where we can go for dinner, he said that you have to go down the hill to the town. Looking at our frustrated face, he pointed to a big and old refrigerator and said there is free food left over by people stayed here yesterday and you can have them if you don’t want to go anywhere. We both said we will take that. We took our much needed showers and started to inspect the refrigerator. I found a half container of potato salad, a half container of coleslaw, and a half Chinese takeout box of noodles while Yile took out some fried chicken and a can of beef ravioli. We filled up our empty stomachs with no time and Yile claimed that’s the best dinner he’s ever had.
There were all kinds of people in the hostel, AT thru hikers, bikers like us, and hippies who just wandering around the country. I’ve hiked sections of AT and stayed in hostels before, but Yile has never met people like them. I went to bed at 8pm left Yile with the new species of people he just discovered.
I got up at 6 and made pancakes from the mix provided by the hostel and woke Yile up. We started our last day of biking by sliding down the big hill. Not far after we back to the trail, there was a big tree fell right on the trail. Bikers had to helping each other lifting bikes over the tree. I am not sure how I could pass that point without Yile.
This is one of the 74 locks on the canal
As we rode crossing a road, we saw a long line of cars along the main road. Yile pointed to the direction of all the cars headed said there is a deli that we can find some food. So we turned in. The small deli store was on the shore of a ferry dock. We met two bikers from Ohio at the store front. As Yile was chatting with them, I went to check out the ferry. One ferry carries 6 cars ($4.00 each) crossing the water less than 100 yard wide (the Potomac River) between Maryland and Virginia. The store owner joined the chatting when I came back. I said the ferry was cool. The store owner said “you don’t have that in Pittsburgh, do you?” I said “I don’t think we do. But we have the thing called bridge”. The two Ohio bikers just laughed out loud.
We passed The Great Falls Nations Park in Virginia in the early afternoon
We knew we were closing to the end of the trail. But we couldn’t believe that until we saw the monument
The trail ended at a beautiful waterfront site of Georgetown
At mile 0
Xiaogang picked us up. We did it!
I was talking to Mary one day after the trip. She asked me “who was the motivator of the trip, you or your son?”
I said “I started the trip, my son finished it up”.
Emily Yi 
