{"id":4860,"date":"2011-11-28T21:53:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T01:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=4860"},"modified":"2011-11-28T21:53:34","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T01:53:34","slug":"co-canal-overnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2011\/11\/28\/co-canal-overnight\/","title":{"rendered":"C&#038;O Canal Overnight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" style=\"vertical-align: middle;\" src=\"http:\/\/farm7.staticflickr.com\/6037\/6405151779_ff7bd1982c_z.jpg\" alt=\"Widewater, along the C&amp;O Canal\" width=\"640\" height=\"428\" \/><\/p>\n<p>For years, my summer to-do list contained: &#8220;Ride out on the C&amp;O Canal, camp&#8221; on it. This despite the fact that I&#8217;m not really much of a camper. \u00c2\u00a0And maybe it&#8217;s because I&#8217;m not much of a camper that I&#8217;ve let it slide, year after year. Took the opportunity last week to fix that, and I&#8217;m glad I did.<\/p>\n<p>While I do lots of dumb things on bikes, I&#8217;ve never actually gone touring. So this was something of a test ride &#8211; from home to Harpers Ferry, WV and back.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>Things I learned:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Muddy C&amp;O = greatly reduced pace.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;s HARD (seriously, my arms still hurt from that).<\/li>\n<li>While I gave my bike a once-over for general mechanical issues, I didn&#8217;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).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The C&amp;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. \u00c2\u00a0Photoset <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blacknell\/sets\/72157628158981375\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For years, my summer to-do list contained: &#8220;Ride out on the C&amp;O Canal, camp&#8221; on it. This despite the fact that I&#8217;m not really much of a camper. \u00c2\u00a0And maybe it&#8217;s because I&#8217;m not much of a camper that I&#8217;ve let it slide, year after year. Took the opportunity last week to fix that, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4861,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860\/revisions\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}