Traverse City Adventure: Ending the day at a bunkhouse in Hancock, MD

DAY 6 - 17 AUGUST 2017 • TRAVERSE BAY ADVENTURE

We pedaled 55.5 miles today.  I’m happy with that. Averaging about 45 miles per day so far at 7 miles per hour or so.  Not a week in yet so still building ourselves.  Plus, most of these miles have been on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath trail and it’s tough to get up much of a head of steam on the gravel and often muddy surface.

After pedaling along the Potomac for so long and looking at so many locks and stone lockhouses and broad dams, it’s easy to start taking it for granted.  But this is a magnificent trail, a 180-mile long national park, and it’s a real credit to our nation.

Last night a Quality Inn in Shepherdstown for $91.  Tonight the bunkhouse behind  C&O Bicycle shop in Hancock. $15 per person. It’s basic but it has everything we need including hot showers, charging stations for all our tech stuff, screens to keep the skeeters at bay, fans to provide the breeze that nature’s not in this hot spell, bunks to sleep 20, clean portable potties and a changing room shielded with a striped curtain made from cloth from Pakistan. Global economy. We’re the only ones here tonight.

Becky wants to make sure I wake her up if nature calls in the middle of the night and I have to trek to the port potties.  She’ll go with me.

Tomorrow we’re headed further west to Cumberland at the western end of the canal trail.

How about all those cicadas and crickets in the day’s last light?  Aren’t they singing up a racket in this heat spell? Maybe foretelling the thunder storms Wunderground’s predicting for 10 p.m.

Sweet dreams.

PS - Sending this from a Hardees in Hancock Friday morning.  Wifi at the bunkhouse wasn’t powerful enough. But at least I get to listen to Nora Jones while I send this. Ravi Shankar comes to mind.