C&O Canal Overnight

For years, my summer to-do list contained: “Ride out on the C&O Canal, camp” on it. This despite the fact that I’m not really much of a camper.  And maybe it’s because I’m not much of a camper that I’ve let it slide, year after year. Took the opportunity last week to fix that, and I’m glad I did.

While I do lots of dumb things on bikes, I’ve never actually gone touring. So this was something of a test ride – from home to Harpers Ferry, WV and back.

That’s 112 miles from my doorstep, and only ~6 on the road. If I tried, I could have cut it down to less than 2. I live in the middle of a real city, so how cool is that?

Things I learned:

• Muddy C&O = greatly reduced pace.
• I made too many assumptions about water/food availability and backups. While I ultimately figured out that you can use the pumps (despite the NPS taking the handles away), that’s HARD (seriously, my arms still hurt from that).
• While I gave my bike a once-over for general mechanical issues, I didn’t think too much about checking that things like the fender mounts were tight. Vibrated one right off, and ended up cannibalizing a light mount to fix it (i.e., keep it from annoying me for the rest of the ride).

The C&O is a great place to test things out. Far enough away from things to make it interesting, close enough for help if it really does go wrong.  Photoset here.