First Tour (Sort of)

[jsdilks]

The trip was fun, albeit tiring. The last part coming home was a bit of a grind for me too. We tried the C&O a couple of weeks ago with a trip up to Great Falls and learned some valuable lessons. As a person who deals with auto-immune stuff and pain type stuff, the vibrations from the packed gravel ended up not being a good option. So anyway, we had originally planned to go to Leesburg up the C&O and back on the W&OD, but after the trip to Great Falls we altered the plan. We did visit the C&O briefly on the weekend, crossing at White's ferry and we found some beautiful spider webs glinting through the dappled sunshine on the canal - I'd never seen such fascinating things. Total bike time was almost 3 hours going up and 2:45 ish coming back. We move along pretty well on the flats, but can't do hills for, well, a hill of beans. And there are a ton of grade crossings on the W&OD which slow you down too. But the avg coming home was 14 mph - like riding a freight train! Slow to stop and slow to start, but give us some room and we can zoom along.