Continuing a Love Affair With the Great Allegheny Passage Trail
My daughter Lauren was born in 1990 when I was 33, at a time when my career was starting to heat up. A new baby added on top of work time and travel had pretty much ix-nayed my biking. My trusty, but not yet rusty, Schwinn Voyager was gathering dust.
But, in 1991 we planned a family vacation to Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland and in researching things to do out there I came across mention of an 11 mile trail that had been opened from Confluence PA to Ohiopyle PA along the Youghiogheny River. I knew my my 10 year-old son and his friend who was coming along, as well as my wife, could do 11 flat miles out and back with a lunch break - all I needed to do was figure out how to bring 18 month-old Lauren along.
I bought one of those rear rack kinda baby seats, put it on the Schwinn and we jammed 4 bikes onto a rack on the back of my wife's Ford Explorer and headed west. We had a blast on that trail section, although my daughter was not a fan of wearing a helmet - within a few miles of the start she ripped it off her head and threw it to her right where it rolled down the embankment almost into the river!
After that trip, I moved up to a Winchester kid trailer and we did lots of family rides on trails in the Baltimore Washington area - I even ended up writing a book
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That progressed to a third-wheel add-on and Lauren and I would bike to her elementary school during the week and on many Maryland/DC trails on the weekends. It also reignited my love of cycling and got me into bicycle touring with a group of friends and on state multi-day rides.
More germane to this journal, that first ride on what would eventually become mile 61-73 or so of the Great Allegheny Passage led to a decades-long love affair with the GAP. In 2016, 2017 and 2018 (and an upgrade from that old Schwinn to a Trek 520 for touring) I pulled together increasingly larger groups of friends and rented the entire Parker House in Confluence PA for what we called "Camp John" - an adult GAP biking-centric weekend, along with many other activities, culminating with everyone riding downhill from Deal PA to Cumberland MD on the GAP, using a local bike shop as a shuttle service.
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Various life issues put an end to recurring Camp John, but the GAP kept pulling me and during a Covid "lull" in October 2021, my bike and I got on Amtrak from Washington DC to Pittsburgh and I did a 2 day GAP through-ride.
Not long after that trip, I found out I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma and 2022 was pretty much a zero year for cycling.
But the GAP kept calling...
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9 months ago