Today was a good checkout for everybody, making sure we and our bikes are ready for the journey. It was a short day from our hotel down to Mt. Vernon, then back up to DC where we had lunch under the arriving flight path of jets landing at Reagan International. Always cool to see these huge metal birds fly over your head at 200 feet. How the hell can those things fly? It still amazes me after 60 plus years of watching airplanes. We then continued up to DC and did a quick tour of the city, led by Terence who used to live in Manassas and worked in the city for many years. This town is amazingly bike friendly with the multitude of bike paths and really wide sidewalks. We got back to the hotel by 3:30, so having started at 8, it was a nice relaxing 8 hour day!
Here is a short video of today’s ride.
Below is the GPS route of the ride. 43 miles at a leisurely average pace of 11 mph. As you can imagine, in the city amongst all the strollers and pedestrians we went very carefully slow!
Ready to head out West tomorrow for the real start of our journey. It will be a 60 mile day going leisurely uphill as we follow the Potomac up towards Cumberland, MD. Our first camping will be at Brunswick MD- enough of this posh hotel living!
Biking across the USA with Mike 
Leave a comment