Vagabond Tracks — by Paul & Amy

27 November 2017 REVISION:  To make it easier to read multiple posts, they are now displayed with the oldest rather than newest on top.  On the list in the left margin, under ARCHIVES, click on the month & year for the posts you would like to see, and they will be in chronological order (there is usually a lag between the date described and the posting date).  Here is the very first post, from spring of 2015:

We will start across the country in mid-June, with a list of over 25 people or couples to visit, our bicycles, hiking boots, and national park passes.  It’s our first post-retirement adventure.  Our long-term goal is to camp, hike, and bike in each of the lower 48 states and 10 Canadian provinces over the next several years, focusing on national parks and rail trails.

We want to be able to periodically update the folks we will be visiting (as well as many other friends & family) on our progress and to share some of our experiences with them.  Sending e-mail updates to a long list seems like a cumbersome and intrusive way to do it, so we’re trying a blog.  That way you can check up on us whenever you feel like it without us cluttering up your in-box.  Be patient, though:  we are rank beginners at blogging.

Our camper is a hard-sided A-frame pop-up camper that we tow behind our car.  It’s about 6.5 feet wide and 12 feet long (excluding the tongue).  Check it out at Aliner.com (their Classic model).

We’ve taken our Aliner for a two-week vacation plus a couple of weekends in each of the last three years, but this year’s 16-week (3.7-month) trip will be more of an odyssey.  Our basic plan is to travel to southern California and back, passing north of the Great Lakes on the way west and south of them on the return trip, with stops in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ontario, Minnesota, Manitoba, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota again, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania again, and Vermont.

We’re both fully retired now.  Amy’s last day in the office was three days ago, Paul’s was two days ago.  Now we’re hustling to take care of all sorts of details before the arrival of both our girls and Lowry’s husband Kyle for a visit, hosting two big parties next weekend, spending five days at Cape Cod, packing up the camper, and heading out with the camper in tow for our big adventure.

It will be a long time away from home and our two cats, but the mother of friends of ours will be visiting them for the summer from Sweden and staying in our house, so Bigelow and Dottie will have some company until we return in the fall.

Our camper now has a name and “home port” displayed on the “transom” as well as emblems symbolizing our quest to hike and bike in all contiguous 48 states and 10 provinces while we are still able to be physically active:

Once on the road, we’ll try to post updates as often as we can, depending on when we can access the internet.

A little unwelcome drama on packing day:  we can’t locate our passports!  Several weeks ago we checked that they hadn’t expired, then refiled them in a “safe” place, knowing that we would need them to travel through Canada on our way west.  They still haven’t turned up after many hours of searching, unpacking, and repacking.  We now plan to reunite with our good friends Bob & Paula (from north of Toronto) in the Finger Lakes region instead of at their home.  We’ll also postpone visiting Manitoba until another trip.

To top it all off, now we have lost two sets of keys, the ring of various camper keys and the car key with a bike lock key attached to it.  At least we had spares, so we can have them duplicated.  Are these events a sign of senility creeping over us?

So today we’re off.  A day later than planned, but it’s rainy anyway.  Yesterday wouldn’t have been a good biking or hiking day in our first destination:  Connecticut.  Good-bye to our cats Bigelow and Dottie, who should be in good hands with the nice lady from Sweden staying in our house for the summer.

“Misty, moisty was the morn, chilly was the weather; there I met an old man, dressed all in leather…”  So began a familiar song from my boyhood.  In Watertown, Connecticut, we hiked a portion of the Mattatuck Trail that passed through Leatherman Cave, named for the local legend who in the 1800s walked a regular circuit of about 360 miles between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers every 34 days or so, subsisting on handouts from the local families he passed on the way and sleeping in caves.  The trail climbed through tall mountain laurel thickets, ran along the edge of a high rocky cliff, and descended to and through the fairly substantial cave formed by rock slabs below the cliff.

Earlier in the day, we biked along the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail from Farmington to Simsbury and back, a scenic paved bike path mostly on a former rail bed (formerly the tow path for the canal between New Haven, Conn., and Northampton, Mass.).  It’s part of the East Coast Greenway, a bike route from Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida. The weather was pleasant, and we had occasional glimpses of the river and “Avon” (Talcott) Mountain with its tower that was so familiar to me, growing up in the Farmington valley.

In western Pennsylvania we stopped to see Kinzua Bridge.  It was the tallest railroad trestle in the world when it was built in 1882 to ship coal, lumber, and oil across the deep valley of Kinzua Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River.  In 2003, nearly half of the span was destroyed by a tornado.  Now you can walk out to the end and peer down a long way to the twisted remains of 11 steel towers that were toppled in that storm.

In the afternoon we hiked through a majestic area of old growth forest in Hearts Content National Recreational Area, in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest.  All along the trail were towering pines and hemlocks 2 to 2.5 feet in diameter, with a few beech, oak, and ash nearly as big.  Just before supper, a short walk from our campsite into the Hickory Creek Wilderness was rewarded with a black bear sighting.

The campground at Hearts Content is very nice, and has to be the most quiet and peaceful place accessible by car that we have ever camped in.  There we feasted on pad Thai made with marinated chicken and lots of fresh veggies.

We biked eight miles down the Sandy Creek valley in northwestern Pennsylvania on this paved bike trail on a former rail bed.  The shade, solitude, many bridges across the creek, and 967-foot-long tunnel made it a delightful ride.

Upon reaching the wide Allegheny River, the trail crosses it on a high bridge then follows the right bank downstream for another four miles, where we turned around.

Friendly cyclists and a trail volunteer we stopped to chat with gave us some good tips for future biking destinations in Pennsylvania.  Ice cream tasted very good after a good bike ride on a warm summer day.

We stayed four nights in Letchworth State Park in western New York, with its stunning views of the nearly 600-feet-deep gorge carved by the Genesee River through sandstone and shale.  There are three major waterfalls in the 17-mile-long park, many scenic overlooks and hiking trails, and a nice little museum.  One trail crosses the park’s only footbridge across the river.

Bob and Paula arrived from North of Toronto to join us at Letchworth for two nights—we’ve been friends since 1969 and Bob was best man at our wedding.  Taking advantage of electric service at this campground, we used the portable pizza oven from “Old Fogeys Outing Club” buddies Dick & Sonia to bake potato strips with one dinner and pizza and some-mores the next night.

In the 1800s the Genesee Valley Canal, perched above the cliffs on the eastern side of the gorge, provided transportation of goods between the Allegheny River and the Erie Canal.  Begun in 1837 and completed in 1861, the GV Canal was later replaced by a railroad and now there are only traces remaining.  We hiked along part of the Finger Lakes Trail on the old railroad bed (former canal tow path) a few miles east from the edge of the Genesee River gorge, then drove a few miles east of Letchworth Park to see a group of seven of the old GV Canal locks, each 12 feet high and lined with blocks of the local bluestone.

The day we left Letchworth was rainy.  We stopped at a farmers’ market and browsed a couple of impressive art collections before spending the rest of the day on the road.  On display at the art gallery opposite the farmers’ market were many exquisite watercolor landscapes by the local contemporary artist Thomas Aquinas Daly.  The Perry Public Library (a Carnegie library) houses a special collection of renowned nineteenth century American artist Lemuel M. Wiles, who painted in the style of the Hudson River School.

From the Finger Lakes region we traveled to just west of Cleveland, to visit Amy’s cousin Ann, her husband Floyd, and their son Rich and his family (wife Deb and sons Gideon & Julian).