Appalachia

Jeffrey rode out with us for the first ten miles after cooking up a great breakfast, and it made a pleasant change to have someone navigate us out of town onto a route he’d helped plot the night before — a fine ride along the ridgeline we’d be climbing back over the following day. Campgrounds were still scarce in this stretch, but two motels sat close together further along. The first, the Fort Motel, had a sign on the office door telling you to ring some fellow if you wanted a room. Several unanswered calls later, and after a conversation with another resident who looked as though he hadn’t showered in weeks, we decided to try our luck a few miles down the road instead. The next place had rooms, a restaurant and a bar, and came in as the cheapest we’d found so far at forty-five dollars including tax. It was easy to see why once we got into the room — the place was properly old — but we weren’t in a position to be fussy. That night at the bar we had a great time with the bartender, Mike Narvaez, a musician himself with a soft spot for British music of the sixties and seventies, who played us tracks off his stack of LPs the whole evening.

Closed roads don’t stop cyclists.

Schuylkill Haven motel — my grandparents used to have a sofa just like that.

Over the following rides we kept crossing paths with the Appalachian Trail, but on the way to York, Pennsylvania, we dropped down into rolling farmland and Amish country. Almost at once we passed our first horse and cart, driven by a plainly dressed Amish woman, and later that day a group of Amish children standing outside a big barn, who gave us a warm smile and a wave back when I called out hello. Interesting, gentle people. I remembered a documentary once about rumspringa, the period when young Amish are sent out into the towns and cities to live as the rest of us do before deciding which life they want to keep — almost all of them, apparently, choose to come home again once they’ve seen how cruel and chaotic the wider world can be.

Leaving York, we picked up one of the well-signposted cross-Pennsylvania cycling routes. After weeks of fairly busy roads it was reassuring to see signs like these — they seem to relax the whole road once drivers know cyclists are expected on it. We hadn’t had any real trouble, but it’s easy to feel like a nuisance without a shoulder, slowing traffic behind you, and it seems only fair that cars share these small county roads while cyclists hold up their end by riding predictably. We passed through apple orchards on the approach to Caledonia State Park, where the fields gave way to forest again, and with a mile still to go and time to kill, Eal and I ducked into a biker bar we’d passed — the “Welcome Bikers” signs meaning a rather different sort of biker to us, though we usually come away from these places with a few sarcastic jokes traded and the motorcyclists themselves always perfectly friendly.

After sinking a Blue Moon we rolled down to the state campground — no alcohol allowed in Pennsylvania’s state parks — where a man in the office invited us over to his family’s pitch later that evening. Scott and Emily, it turned out, played host to passing Appalachian Trail hikers every year, feeding them up with the calories to keep going. It was good fun talking with the hikers, some of whom I’d shared a night’s lodging with two years earlier at a hostel in Damascus, Virginia. One of them had a story everyone who already knew it kept urging him to tell again — an encounter he and a few others had had on the trail some weeks before — and he told it beautifully, the whole group of us sitting engrossed around the fire. I couldn’t do it justice retelling it here, though it did make the local press at the time.

Emily and Scott had us back for breakfast with the hikers the next morning and filled us to bursting with blueberry pancakes, enough to see us through that day’s ride and tomorrow’s besides. They even sent us off with carry-out bags, Eal and me included alongside the hikers, stuffed with ramen noodles, chocolate and leftover pancakes. Genuinely lovely people — as I told Emily when I thanked her, it beat the gas-station breakfast we’d resigned ourselves to that morning by some distance.

Breakfast with the trail hikers — thanks to Emily and Scott.

The ride to McConnellsburg took us over several long ridge climbs, the worst of the heat finally letting up under an overcast sky. We stopped at the top of the last climb at another biker bar before an eye-watering descent into town, and found another cheap motel, camping again out of the question with the surrounding forest all state game lands. At the motel I asked the woman on the desk if there was anywhere in town to get a long-overdue haircut. There wasn’t, she said, but she rang a friend of hers who did cuts and had her come round to the motel instead. My mother is a hairdresser, which had left me twenty-five years into life without ever setting foot in a barbershop or paying anyone for a trim. Sitting on a chair outside the motel while a stranger cut my hair was a strange way to end that particular streak, but she was friendly and did a genuinely good job. When I asked what I owed her, she said she only ever took what a customer thought it was worth. I gave her fifteen dollars, which felt fair, and I have still, to this day, never been inside an actual barbershop.

Up and over several of these ridges today.

Haircut! Sorry, Mum.

Tröegs, a Pennsylvania brewery.