Day 2: The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania

Miles today: 80-something plus 2 on foot

Miles so far: 280-something

The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania is actually the Pine Creek River Gorge and the state parks that surround it. It's 50 mi long and 1300 ft deep. I saw it in a travel book and it was on the way to our destination, so we decided to check it out. No one we talked to had ever heard about it and there were not any services nearby, so I kept warning that it could be a total bust. After much ado figuring out the right trail, we went to the trailhead for a 1 mi hike down and back up instead of the 3 mi hike Julie had read about because this park had paved parking. I *hate* gravel. It was a pretty ride about an hour and some change away. 

There were a lot of motorcycles there. Some guys came over to look at Julie's bike. I never put logos back on it after getting it painted, so it's common for people to ask which make and model it is. We talked with them for a little while. And we saw my purple motorcycle buddy. That makes two purple motorcycles on the road plus 2 purple big rigs observed in my lifetime. 


We changed in to hiking boots, locked up our gear and embarked on our hike. It was VERY steep, 800 ft down over a mile, which comes to a 15% average grade. I would NOT want to trip and fall down that hillside. 


We made it down and took a snack break. Jaron got a ginormous pretzel last night and brought the leftovers as a hiking snack. 


Then it was time for the grueling trip back up. Sweet Jesus. 


Back up top we took some time to appreciate the view. AND there was an ice cream truck. Hot damn, that hit the spot. 

Went back to the hotel and walked to the downtown area for dinner at a very highly rated Greek restaurant. They had just closed at 7:30, so we took an Uber to Julie's second choice. Bastards were closed with no hours posted on the door. So we get back in to the same Uber to go to the restaurant we went to last night and THOSE fuckers were also closed! It's like 8:00 by this point and Julie makes yet another destination update on the Uber trip to go back to the hotel and hope that the hotel restaurant was open. It was, so no one was harmed in the making of this post. 

Tomorrow we head up to the finger lakes to stay IN A CASTLE. IN A TOWER!!! Very excited about this. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pictures

Image
Uploading pictures while I have cell service.  My suit in my chair.  From the top of Paw Paw tunnel. We weren't allowed up there.  Bicycles in the site next to ours.  The Bivy sack that we store gear in. 
Read more

Days 6 & 7: Shitty End to an Awesome Trip

Image
Miles today: 200+ Miles so far: 980? (Gah! We won't hit 1,000 now.) So when we were on the Niagara river, our phones touched Canadian airspace and we both got messages about international rates. When we were getting ready to head out, Jaron noticed that navigation was now in metric and he could not figure out how to change it back to custom. The usual options were not presenting themselves. So we were having an interesting time working with that. At the next stop he was able to change it back to custom, but decided to leave it at metric because, after all, his motorcycle is very popular in Europe.  We officially don't GAF about check-out times anymore. When anyone asks, we keep saying we're amost outta there. Noon seems like a far more reasonable check-out time.  We did not have any hotel arranged for Thu night since we hadn't decided what exactly we were doing on the trip back. Julie has been wanting to "freeball it" and just figure out where we're st...
Read more

Post-Party Depression

Image
Miles today: 317.7 (2,965.3 so far) Hours in the saddle: 5:39 (69:03 so far) Theme music: Eminem & Julie’s “shake it” playlist Cold long-haul day today.  Shook out all of the maps except for PA and did route planning last night. I’m trying to have things to look forward to on the way home other than interstates and cheap motels. 🤮 Starting to feel a little bit of post-party depression ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3Fterm%3DPost-Party%2520Depression%26amp%3Dtrue )  now that our trip is winding down. I’ve spent like 9 months looking forward to it and am already trying to think of the next one. Jaron said we should finish this one first?  So I found a couple of scenic stretches and we have a couple of stops and we’ll get home by Friday. We have our camping gear, but it takes time to set up and pack up and we have just had a lot of long days so we haven’t camped on this trip. I didn’t ever find a good resource for campgrounds in Canad...
Read more