A good day today- 63 miles and 2,355 ft of elevation gain going from Pittsburgh to Wheeling, West Virginia. Nice weather starting off in the high 60s and getting into the 70s, partly cloudy. It was a bit windy in stretches and it was a dead-on headwind, so a bit challenging! And there were some nice hills- first getting out of Pittsburgh to the south there was a big one, and then right after we got into West Virginia a couple pretty challenging 9% grades. After that we dropped into the Ohio valley and followed a nice bike trail the last 20 miles or so along the Ohio all the way to Wheeling. Below are the RidewithGPS stats.
It was a bit tricky getting out of Pittsburgh, we made some wrong turns, but sorted it out and after we got on that first big hill out of the city all was straight forward from then on. Some of us gathered at the border between PA and WVA to have some lunch and take a group photo, then off we went to tackle those two big hills. I have a Wahoo ELEMNT GPS with the downloaded RidewithGPS routes that Adventure Cycling provided to us and it works pretty well on the road. On complicated city routes it is a bit more sketchy.
We passed the Cardinal Powerplant on the Ohio River 10 miles North of Wheeling. It is actually three units, each burning coal, producing a total of 1.8GW of power. I didn’t realize that the US was still using coal fired plants, but this is West Virginia! Apparently they have invested quite a bit to make it as clean running as possible. Certainly not a ton of soot pouring out the smokestacks, as was the case in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing!
Just missed a huge thunderstorm that hit Wheeling today after 4PM. Fortunately we are staying in a church gymnasium so we are out of the weather and do not have to contend with tents flying all over the place!
I searched all over for pepperoni rolls, apparently a “thing” in West Virginia- everyone was sold out!
Biking across the USA with Mike 
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