Day 2 — North Bend Trail

Getting the theme here? Ride hard, sweat a ton, then refresh and recharge.

We’re in Pennsboro at Maggie’s Bar. Another hot one, 63.2 miles, but 6 of those were backtracking trying to find a bike shop in Clarksburg West Virginia. The first place which had ads all over Google, was a house with no visible sign of life, and a worker there said they just emptied the house and the people moved next door but don’t count on it. Then we found Holy Moses bike shop, which was supposed to open at 11, but no sign of life at 11:15. And the mess on the floor of the shop didn’t inspire confidence. Papa Hobo has a shimmy in the front wheel that only becomes apparent at 20 mph, but going down some of these big hills it really becomes a shake fest. Hope to find a shop on the way tomorrow but I’ll just live with it till then.

We rode on the north bend trail today. Dear WV trail people: baseball and softball sized stones are not trail building material. We both have our gravel tires on, but it was still tough. Fortunately there were a lot of side roads that parallel the trail and we were able to use those and they were a lot faster and a lot smoother.

We’re staying with a guy named James tonight, and we met after we pulled into a supposed campground, which is a kind of RV park – very loosely an RV park.

Anyway, we were hanging around trying to decide whether we were going to try to stay there or go to somewhere else, and James came out of his trailer and offered to call the owner, and then just offered us his floor in his air conditioned porch. And a shower, which was wonderful after riding 8 mi on route 50. This is the first road angel we run into and he certainly is one we’re going to have a nice rest get an early start tomorrow and hopefully beat the rain to our next stop which we don’t even know what it is yet. Life on the road.