Bike About 2025 – Phase V Pennsylvania
February 24, 2026 § Leave a comment
When I started this adventure I wasn’t really sure I would finish it. That is kind of how I feel about documenting it as well. Ha! It takes a lot of effort to put these posts together, even when you are retired. Now here I am (or was) in Pittsburgh PA after more than 3000 miles and getting ready to start the next phase of the trip. At least this begins with friends as my friend and buddy, a brother really, committed to joining and put in the miles and effort training so that he could spend 4 days on the bike riding with me. To show my flexibility I allowed him to alter my plan to ride the GAP and PANTS rides to get to his cabin into starting on the GAP, and then heading about as East as you can go through Pennsylvania, stringing other rail trails together so that we keep the mileage in the reasonable category and get to his cabin outside of Woodward PA by Thursday. My friends Bruce, Terry, and Ed arrive on Friday to hang out with me for a weekend of zeros that still warms my heart. The format for this post will continue to be copied in logs from my Strava account that I was pretty good at keeping up-to-date. Each entry will have a link to the ride on Strava, my Insta posting for that day as well as a flyover of the route from Relive.cc. I will also embed a stitched together video from all the Live photos I took during the day and now that I have company, there should be more photos to work with as well as videos.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania
February 23, 2026 § Leave a comment
Ohio should go quickly, but Pennsylvania will be very hard, and I have 3 zero days built in so I can hang with my buddy and his family Larry Butler (Drew and Melanie) as well as any of my backpacking/camping brothers that can take time away from their own lives to share time with me. The closer I get to Pittsburgh, where I will meet Larry, the details of our journey together have started to mature. His son Drew will support us by carrying our gear so that Larry doesn’t have to 1) find gear to carry his gear on his bike and 2) worry about anything other than riding a bike with me for four days. 2) is a large enough task that I am sure Larry lost a lot of sleep worrying about as I got closer. The first day of Ragbrai I made an effort to ride with Pete for a fair part of the day and asked him to get in touch with Larry and assure him that I can ride slow enough so that we can enjoy the ride together.
« Read the rest of this entry »A Return To Michaux
December 15, 2021 § Leave a comment
The plans for a late Fall adventure began to take shape during the 3 day Indigenous Peoples Day weekend in October when I accepted an invitation (I invited myself) to spend some time with my longtime friends Larry and Melanie Butler at their cabin in the woods behind Woodward, Pa. As it so happened, this was also the weekend of Pennsylvania’s tremendously successful gravel bike ride UnPaved, which Larry and I planned to “Bandit Ride” a shorter segment. I brought all my Pennsylvania Lizard maps with me so we could take some time to glance at “possibilities”.
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Big Bird's Adventures 