Montour trail

After Dan and Emily left around 6:30 this morning. I made some oatmeal and finished packing up. By this time the neighboring camp had awakened. A father and his young son probably about 7 or 8 years old. Raccoons had stolen there pop tarts in the night. I heard the dad say I have bad news, there’s no pop tarts. We can have rice or noodles for breakfast. The child was not happy about it. I had poptarts in my pack from who knows when. Im not crazy about them so they tend to last a long time in my food bag. As I was leaving I gave them the box. After all the kindness I’ve been shown the past couple days it felt good to do something for someone else.

I got to McKeesport around 11 I think. There is a community garden in the city. I’ve never heard of that but I thought it was a great idea. Unfortunately I could not find anything that was quite ready to be picked.

After that I had a few miles of road riding. It was mostly quiet roads and I never felt uncomfortable with the traffic. I passed through Glassport and over the Monongahela River. There was lots of barges being loaded with coal. Each individual barge hold 1,800 tons! When all the barges are put together there can be up to 72,000 TONS that would be 1050 tractor trailers. The bigger tug boats have up to 10,000 horse power. Shortly after that the trail started.

At the trailhead I met 3 people. 2 men and a woman. We had a nice conversation and we joked about how much my bike weighs. The woman was kind enough to take our picture. In the picture you can see he is showing off and lifting his with one arm.

A little way down the trail, two of them caught up and passed me, the lady who took the pic and the other gentleman who is not pictured. He was riding an awesome Specialized bike. (Its aweful I can remember bikes but not names) Anyway, she said that I was an inspiration and he shared some important route info. Thank you for the information and the kind words!

After that the trail started following a creek. Peters run i think. I had ran out of water and needed to refill so I stopped and filtered. It was tempting to buy some at one of the many stores I passed but I didn’t want to spend the money.

I stopped to swim at a campsite along the same creek. I’ve worn the same clothes now for 6 days so I jumped in fully clothed. The water felt great. Then I had some lunch. Whole wheat tortillas with peanut butter. Somehow the afternoon slipped by and I’m still here tonight. Its a very nice spot. A guy rode in this evening and we talked for a while. He had a really nice recumbent trike that he installed an electric assist motor. It was a really nice set up. We even discussed more then bikes and gear! He had lost a lot of weight and told me of some YouTube videos to watch. He showed me some pictures from before . I could hardly recognize him.

It was a easy day. I only biked 21 miles which is embarrassing! I guess that’s the nice thing about no schedule.