May 12, 2024
I’m on my own again and during the night I checked Dan’s location and he’d made it home to Pittsburgh. It was a 7-1/2 hour ride after whatever we did in the morning. Ah, youth!
I woke up around 6:30 and read on my Kindle for a while before getting dressed and venturing out for a hike. The park has numerous hiking trails and I got out the map they gave me and decided to go see the Cave Amphitheater. Along they way I shot a few photos like the restroom/picnic shelters they have and the stone walkway along the lake. It appears that only one other campsite is occupied in this loop.
The trail was an uphill route through the woods on a fairly well maintained trail.
For the route back I did the Pine Trail that was mostly uphill and ended up at another playground, a half mile up the road from where I camped. It felt great to get out and get some morning exercise.
When I got back to my campground loop I stopped and chatted with the young couple who were camped near me. They live nearby and had left their kid with grandma and had a night out together. I was packing up when they drove past me and they stopped to tell me that the night before they go to a lookout point to see if the Northern Lights were and and when they went past my site there was a skunk across the road from me. I'm glad nothing disturbed it.
The rest of the day was about riding to Pittsburgh and it was, luckily, uneventful as it was long. The first half was on Hwy 119 and the second half was on The Slab, I-79. I did a few rest stops, a stop for lunch, and a couple for gas. Nothing else to report except at one point, traffic stopped all the sudden and there was a car parked on the shoulder and a woman in the center divider chasing what looked like a fat woodchuck. WTF? I really do need to get a good camera for this stuff.
I’ll also say that Southern Folks are extremely friendly. I stopped in Pikesville (a really nice town that I need to research a bit) and pulled over into a parking lot to look at the map and a truck pulled up and asked if I was lost. He ended up telling me some curvy routes nearby and that Pikesville was home to the largest earth moving project ever and pointed it out.
As I rode along on Hwy 119, I noticed all the terraced hillsides that had been excavated to allow this highway to come through the region. This is another thing I want to look up when I get home.
That’s it. A great day and I arrived at Dan’s house in Pittsburgh a bit after 7 pm and sat down for a cold beer.
It was a 412 mile day.
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