Saturday, November 22, 2008
Route Planning for Stage 2
As mentioned under our routes, we're considering stage one of our ride to be from the Jersey Coast to Frederick, MD. This is mostly flat terrain, over areas that we're somewhat familiar with. Stage two will be to our friend Anne's house, out in Ohio. That means stage two has our first real climbing. I thought it might be time to actually pick a route.
We have a few choices for this part of the route. Our first, and original, option is to ride from Lancaster, PA to Frederick MD. From there we'd head west to Cumberland, MD. From there we'd have 250 miles to Anne's, mostly through western Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania.
Option two would be to ride from Lancaster to Chambersburg, PA, completely skipping Maryland. From Chambersburg we'd go west on US route 30, through all the hills, until we reached Anne's sometime later. We'd be saving about 50 miles of travel this way.
Option three is the combination. Go south to Frederick, then go northwest, through Hagerstown, and into the PA hills.
My original plan was option one. Staying in Frederick is free, since we live there. While we're in Frederick we'd also have the opportunity to reevaluate our gear, changing stuff based on our somewhat improved level of experience. The ride to Cumberland would be our longest of the trip up to that point - 90 some miles. We want to check out Cumberland some time, since it's on highways, has hills, and has a real downtown area. Plus, the hills in Maryland aren't quite as high as the ones in Pennsylvania.
Option two is more interesting. The ride from Lancaster to Gettysburg isn't much fun, but once you're west of Gettysburg there's a nice, wide shoulder on good pavement. We'd get to ride through Gettysburg, where we both went to college. We'd need to ask our friend Tammy if we could stay with her family in Chambersburg, which could be awesome, since they're a lot of fun. But after we left Tammy's we'd be in for some hard riding. Our goal would be to do one hundred mile days, and do three in a row. Plus, the day after Tammy's gives us some terrible hills. The first bad one would be 1200 feet of climbing over four miles. However, we'd probably take a detour and ride through the former PA turnpike. This really, really cool project lets you ride on an abandoned four lane highway in the middle of the forest, and lets you skip a major hill by riding through it in an old tunnel. Plus, since this would be a four day route, we'd save one day's expenses.
Option three gives us the advantages of hitting Frederick, and still lets us ride through the cool tunnel. We'd also go through Mercersburg, which is a town we'd like to visit some time, and lets us see Buchanan's birthplace. We'd still hit pretty big hills, but we'd probably be able to do 80 mile days every day, which would mean we were gradually increasing our daily mileage, instead of it leaping upward suddenly, like it does in option 2.
I think that right now I'm leaning toward option two, since I think it'd be fun to ride through Gettysburg and see so much of US-30. But I'm waiting for Jillian's input. Sadly, she has a paper due Monday, so it will probably be after Thanksgiving before we make any real decision.
← Inspiration | Home | A random head, plus some travels →
| posted at: 15:23 |
permanent link and comments
