Our party in Pittsburgh was over.. for a short while. Good news was, we had plans to return.
Our route to Cincinnati was to be filled with several trails with planned rides through the towns of Uhrichsville, Columbus and Xenia. Right out of Pittsburgh there is the Panhandle trail that rides through western Pennsylvania, the panhandle of West Virginia and finishes just east of Steubenville, Ohio. Three states on one 12-mile trail!
Starting on a Sunday morning, there were plenty of cars parked at the trailhead. This was a heavily-used trail and it showed.
One nice gentleman came over, introduced himself, and learned that our route to DC was going to come back through Pittsburgh. In learning so, he donated a fantastic book dedicated to the trail connecting the two cities. Thank you kind stranger! Can’t wait to put it to use on our way to DC!
Once we got to riding, the trail was similar to many of our previous trails we had rode on. Dirt path, flat for days and only a bit of traffic. Human traffic. No cars. Which, I don’t know why people have a “problem” with human traffic on a bike path. Every time I see people on a bike, on the same path as me, chatting, smiling and having a jolly good time, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. And well, I like that. I don’t want to be the only person out there. If I did, I’d sit in my car by myself and grumble about the cruddy car traffic and pollution to… myself.
We’ve had so many of these great trails lately, that it’s definitely a cause for a celebration. Ever since Des Moines, we’ve had trail after trail it seems. When on a slick trail where there is little traffic and a lot of free time for us; we talk baseball, discuss life, ponder the future of B4B… but we also sing.
Back on track, the trail ended actually in West Virginia. We had heard hilly WV was, cause of the Appalachians, but we hadn’t rode through the state yet.
Funny, because the small panhandle area that we rode through in WV, was some of the quickest and steepest climbing we’d done since… Atlanta? It’d been a while. It was a nice mix-up. Feels good to stand up and climb. To actually raise our heart-rate a wee bit. With such long endurance rides, we get into cruising mode often and aren’t activating our anaerobic metabolism.
But then, once we reached the top of the hill, followed up with a curvy and fast downhill, we were back to the flatlands of the midwest in Ohio. It would be like that for the rest of the day via Hwy 22 to Hwy 250 all the way to Uhrichsville.
Riding on Highway’s though, we aren’t awarded the beautiful views that we are on the trails as frequently. But we were on our ride to Uhrichsville through Lake Tappan Park, a recreational lake in eastern Ohio.
Many boaters and fishermen populated the lake with it being a Sunday. As a storm developed on the far side of the lake, it provided us with a gorgeous views out over the lake.
We used one of our Best Western nights in Uhrichsville so that we could enjoy another wonderful night’s sleep. We are actually pretty tired leaving a city so it helps to have a good night’s rest the first night out of a major city. Combine the clinic, the baseball-watching and hanging out with our hosts, leaves us with a different kind of tired from the physical exhaustion of riding our bicycles.
Waking up feeling refreshed we set our sights on Columbus, OH, the home of THE Ohio State and the capital of Ohio! Another capital city visit for us. Our capital city visits:
- Phoenix, AZ
- Santa Fe, NM
- Denver, CO
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Baton Rouge, LA
- Atlanta, GA
- Nashville, TN
- Jefferson City, MO
- Des Moines, IA
- St. Paul, MN
- Madison, WI
- Lansing, MI
- Columbus, OH
We actually just counted these to figure this out. Need to brush up on our capital city knowledge! Had to Google a couple of these to make sure they were capitals. Then we went into how many capitals we think we can still hit: Washington DC, Hartford, Providence and Boston. 17 capitals on the summer, 30 MLB ballparks. We’ll take it!
Thanks to Adam’s good friend Lars, we had another hotel night’s stay to look forward to in Columbus. Thanks Lars!
This allowed us the luxury of taking some time to visit the campus of Ohio State and to stop at the Horseshoe. This stadium holds over 102,000 people!
We also found this monstrosity on the side of the highway – the home of the
Longaberger company.
That is going to be the largest picnic basket I have ever seen. If there is bigger, that’s just weird. People actually work in there too! That’s cool.
We knew our next day we were going to join up with the
Ohio to Erie Trail. First, starting in London, we had the Prairie Grass Trail to ride. Doing our research the previous night, we had found a blogger comment that this was SUCH a boring ride that he chose to ride on the neighboring highway instead. Well we instantly found this to be poppycock. The ride was a paved trail for 30 miles all the way to Xenia, OH. Most of the trails that we rode were crushed limestone or dirt. The dirt paths are great because they separate us from car traffic but they definitely knock a couple MPH off of our speed. With a paved trail we were free to speed along without a care in the world. Sure, corn fields dominated our view, but a paved trail, no car traffic and trees providing shade for our route, is exactly what we want.
Once we got to Xenia, there was a nice bike depot for us to charge our phones, fill up on water, have a bathroom break and meet other tourers on the trail.
Always a pleasure seeing someone else with their bicycle loaded up with pannier bags on the trail. Easy to start a conversation with,
Where you heading today?
That gets the conversation started and from there it’s all about swapping touring stories. We love that about the road. People love sharing their story and love hearing our story. It’s a great way to interact with other bicyclists across the country. And there are, to our surprise, a ton of tourers out here in the Midwest and East. We’d figure the West would have been tourer-heavy, but it’s actually out here. We love it!
The second-half of the trail to Cincinnati was via the Miami Scenic Trail. This one was a beaut!
And it rode through a cute little town that is VERY bike-friendly. So bike-friendly in fact that as I got off my bike to walk around the town, I found a little runner’s shop. As I was about to walk in with my bike cleats, I saw this sign.
Now, that’s a bicycle town. We stopped and had a couple local beers and pounded down all the 1/2 price appetizers we could. We only had about 25 miles left of our 115-mile ride and we needed to refuel. We went kind of overboard and hit a mini food coma. But it was a necessary and enjoyable coma.
As the trail poured into the streets of Cincinnati, the number of cyclists didn’t stop. We saw many along our path to GABP via Wooster Pike, Highway 50 and Riverside Dr right along the Ohio River. We snagged our classic pic in front of the stadium
and headed off to our host’s place, Lynn’s, in Kentucky.
We had never met Lynn before that night. Our 6th, SIXTH!!, person/family that we had never met before staying with them. What generous people. Lynn was great and is the VP of recruitment of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Cincinnati. HUGE traveler. Very passionate about it. Again, we love sharing stories with travelers.
After spending much of our time walking around the city of Cincinnati and running into one of the best pitchers in baseball –
it was time to head to DC! We were going to take the EXACT same trail on the way back to DC, stop in Pittsburgh… and go to a Steelers preseason game!
Our lovely hosts, the Webbers, were season-ticket holders for the Steelers. We looked at our schedule and saw that we would, coincidentally, be passing right through Pittsburgh on our way to DC when the Steelers would be playing a pre-season home game. Being the generous people the Webbers are, they offered up their tickets to the Biking for Baseball team to attend a game at Heinz Field! Well heck yes we’ll do that!
So we booked it the exact same way we came, but we had to book it. On the way, we almost ran over a snake in the road! A live one! We played with it a little in the road, he might have hissed at us, maybe not though. We let him be and continued on.
Rex also ran into a bit of a problem. Waiting at a stop light, the light turned green, he stood up and prepared to step on it to accelerate out of his stop. As he did so, one of the teeth on his chain ring broke clean off. This rendered his bike useless along the side of the road. THIS is why we have a support vehicle. TO THE RESCUE! We saved Rex and continued on. At least we were on our way to a big city to get it fixed up again and back on the road.
The rest of our ride back to Pitt was smooth and uneventful. We crushed. We rode. We high-fived. We sang. We arrived. Back in the ‘Burgh!
Tonight, we are going to turn Biking for Baseball into Biking for Football for one night.
Tomorrow, we continue our ride to DC! Let’s go Steelers! (Only time we will actually say this, probably ever)
