Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ling hazard). I'd reached the foothills of the Appalachians, a wholly different kind of rid-
ing from what I'd encountered before on this trip. In the West, the hills are long and
relentless but even in the Rockies are graded less steeply than they are here in the East,
where no road builders, it seems, have ever heard of a switchback. The ascents are short-
er—you don't have any four- or five- or six-mile climbs—but they stand up straight-
er, like spikes driven into the flat ground. To get to the top, you crank down into your
granny gear and try to find a comfortable pedal stroke even as your quads, hamstrings,
and glutes are sending similar messages to your brain—Hey, what the hell is this? There
were occasional rewards at the top: views of valleys with the seasonal colors beginning
to change, and when the roadbed wasn't too chewed up, an exciting plunge down the
other side. But overall it has been slow going. I've had about a hundred miles of it now,
starting in eastern Ohio, not long after I crossed I-71, which makes me look forward to
the GAP as a welcome respite.
Tuesday I started in the quiet and quaint village of Bolivar—rhymes with Oliv-
er—and landed on the western shore of the Ohio River just below Wellsville, a dour-
looking town hemmed in by geography, a wall of imposing hills to the west squeezing it
against the water. It wasn't an overly long ride, fifty miles or so, but it was enervating,
up and down, up and down, in and out of soaking showers, on roads that had probably
needed repaving for a long time. By the time I stopped for a midafternoon lunch at
McDonald's, my wrists were sore and my fingers stiff and gnarled from the rattling. The
sun was breaking through by then and my clothes were reasonably dry (though my
shoes weren't), but I felt glum and pretty bedraggled.
It wouldn't get much better, either. To get across the river, I had to ride six miles or
so upriver to East Liverpool, and the only road was a high-speed four-lane highway; its
shoulder was wide enough for safety, but it was littered with debris and fed me into the
crowded center of town where—preposterously, because it's really not a very big place
and you'd think my sense of direction would be pretty well honed by now—I got lost
looking for the bridge and spent fifteen minutes making wrong turns down residential
streets of weathered row houses and commercial strips pocked with empty storefronts.
When I finally got over the bridge, I had to ride seven miles or so downriver on the
West Virginia side from Newell, where the Holiday Inn was unaccountably full, to find
a place to stay. It was another terrible stretch of road, dangerously narrow, pocked and
busy, and at the end of it a meager reward: the Mountaineer Casino, Racetrack & Resort,
a brassy adult amusement park of a place where they gave me an awful, tiny ground-
floor room with a window opening so close upon the parking lot that I could just about
reach out and polish the grille of the nearest Buick.
