July 10, 2016
East or West
Quick - is Pittsburgh East or West of Ft Lauderdale?
If your geography is as poor as mine, you might think Pittsburgh is West of Ft Lauderdale. I did because
A) Ft Lauderdale is right on the Atlantic Coast.
B) Washington is also on the Atlantic Coast.
C) The Altantic Coast runs roughly North/South.
D) Pittsburgh is 6 days of cycling West from Washington.
The fatal flaw in that logic is that the coast is not really North/South. Pittsburgh is still (slightly) East of our starting point near Ft Lauderdale.
We spent a rest day in Connellsville at a very nice B&B. Since it is only a block from the GAP, most of the guests are bike tourists. Most are travelling toward Washington rather than toward Pittsburgh, so we could inform each other about what to expect in our respective directions.
An important member of the Connellsville B&B staff is Odie the dog.
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On Sunday we hit the trail again, heading from Connelsville to Homestead, just outside of Pittsburgh. The GAP continued along the Youghiogheny (Yok) River valley. The Pennsylvania valleys we have been travelling through are too narrow for farming. All of the farming is "rooftop" farming on top of the ridges where we can't see it. This far West it tends to be mining on the ridges, not farming.
One cultural difference we noted is that the towns we passed had baseball fields in the parks and schools, not soccer fields as in Florida.
As we got close to Homestead the Youghiogheny merged with the larger Monongahela River. We entered the steel valley section of the GAP. This section is haunted by old mines, coke ovens and rust belt skeletons of closed steel mills.
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