Category Archives: Virginia

Oct 22 0 comments
Uncategorized, Virginia

Richmond to Windsor

Oh, Virginia. Where else can you be riding down a road and suddenly see a field full of civil war canons? Maybe further south as well, but so far, we’ve only seen it in Virginia. 

Leaving Richmond yesterday, we met another touring cyclist named Everett from New Hampshire. He had taken the Amtrak to Richmond and is cycling south to Florida for the winter. We all camped in the field of the Peterson family of Hopewell, VA last night, and tonight we’re all camping in the Blackriver area of Virginia in a town called Windsor. It’s a beautiful place and today we had our first sighting of… 
Cotton fields! Exciting stuff for us Yankees (as we’re increasingly being labeled) and we’re frankly relieved to have a change from the endless cornfields we’ve been passing through for the last month. Pretty stuff- cotton fields… 
Anyway, we put in a very long day of riding today (67 miles!!!) and we’re awfully tired so we’re all going to pass out so we can try to make it well into North Carolina tomorrow! We’re had some great interviews for the project so far, including a 12-year old boy outside of DC talking about his timeline for global warming, a man who cooks at a gas station and collects cans that kids throw away and turns them in to pay for gas for his scooter which he drives to work everyday, and a retired farmer who still grows sweet potatoes and greens and watermelon on the land his family has farmed for years. 

Oh, and we have to mention, though we’ve been exhausted putting in 16 hour days between riding and interviewing and editing, when we run into sunsets like the one on the way to the campground tonight we feel pretty lucky to be out here. 

Oct 20 0 comments
Uncategorized, Virginia

Richmond

On our way into Richmond, VA, we stopped to look at our map in front of a Corrections Center and got to chatting with a gentleman who worked there. He was so friendly and insisted we take some maps and a bag of food he put together for us. It was much appreciated and the next morning Alan enjoyed the juice “boxes” that he had provided for us… 

But we thought the packaging was pretty funny and we took a shot of them.

We really enjoyed the ride into Richmond though, and saw lots of lovely horse farms with just gorgeous horses like this one:

We also passed through Ashland, VA, which seemed like a very cool little town. We had lunch in their local coffee shop and it was delicious!!! We would have liked to have spent more time in Ashland, but we had to press on to Richmond!
Home of the largest statutes we’ve seen:
If you look super hard, you can see me standing in front of the ENORMOUS monument. This one is in front of the capital building in Richmond. 
We have actually really enjoyed our time here in Richmond- we’ve met lots of really nice people and the city is beautiful and full of history! We wandered around today, watched a bit of the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 5K Walk and visited The Museum of the Confederacy where we took in some history from a side we (coming from the Northeast) weren’t really used to. It was fascinating, and we even got to tour the White House of the Confederacy and meet Jim:
Jim let us hold the riffles and touch the clothes that soldiers would have worn- giving us a much better picture of what it must have been like to fight in the war. He even gave us each some real civil war bullets! Anyway, Virginia is chock-full of history and it’s been pretty cool riding right through it. More tomorrow when we leave Richmond and keep riding south…

Oct 20 0 comments
Uncategorized, Virginia

Some Long Riding

On Friday we rode 55 miles. On Saturday we pushed out the next 65 miles to get to Richmond, VA. Now we’re here and we’re resting. It was pretty flat riding, but even with flat terrain, riding a bike that weighs 70+lbs for 55 or 65 miles is pretty tiring. We checked into a cheap hotel in Richmond though, and we’re exploring the city for a day before we take off for North Carolina! It’s freeeeeezing here, but we are assured by everyone that we meet that this temperature is quite unusual for Richmond. Hopefully it’ll warm before we take off again…

Oct 17 2 comments
Uncategorized, Virginia

Nokesville, VA

Nokesville, Virginia, in the 2000 census had a population of 1,236. People. Probably more horses. Not sure how much it’s grown since 2000, but I’m thinkin’ not too much. We stopped at the corner store and asked about local campgrounds… but we were having some trouble understanding them. Which we took to mean that we’ve officially entered the South. We kept pushing on, and found a lovely family who invited us to camp in their yard, then insisted we stay in the guest room (it is threatening rain tonight). 
But backing up… we started out the day right. Got up early, rode pretty hard right away and covered some ground until we found a supermarket for breakfast. Here’s Alan halfway through his breakfast crueler which was originally the size of his head (I couldn’t get my camera out fast enough to get the whole thing). Delicious. 

Fueled by the massive pastry, Alan persisted and we pedaled into the impending rain clouds before realizing that Alan’s sleeping pad was unprotected from the rain. He pulled into a development and met Virginia:
She grabbed some plastic bags for us, wished us luck on our journey and off we went! Thanks Virginia! 

Oh, and I popped a tire on all the broken glass on the side of the road. No biggie, but I thought you might enjoy a shot of me changing a tire to match the earlier shot of Alan. Keep in mind it was about 85 degrees and humid. HUMID. Oh, and I’m wearing my rain pants over my cycling shorts and sweating profusely because they don’t breathe. That’s why they are rolled at the top and bottom and looking quite bunchy. Haha. Oh well. 
Anyway, we’re here in Nokesville now, resting up for tomorrow… oh! And a big thank you to Kate Fletcher and Maine Media Workshops for profiling us in their newsletter! We miss everyone up there! 
Oct 16 0 comments
Uncategorized, Virginia

Not the best of days…

You win some, you lose some. And today was definitely not our day. We left our friends’ house in Falls Church to take the metro back to our route. But we got lost on the way to the metro, climbed a huge hill, found the metro and tried to balance our bikes among the hundred of people on the DC lines crowing the entrances and exits to the trains. We made it to downtown Alexandria where we picked up our route and continued south. Slowly. Oh! But first we stopped for some much needed lunch at the worst “crab shack” on the planet. It also claimed to be the oldest in the area, dating to 1940-something. Alan ordered the “fresh crabcake sandwich and I had a cod sandwich. Both were pretty dismal. For example, mine was two slices of grocery store wheat toast with a slab of old fried fish between them. Nothing else. 

So I was dragging today (I twisted my knee weird a couple days ago) and we didn’t make it too far before Alan needed some more air in his back tire. We used our little hand pump. It broke and essentially deflated his tire. We passed Mt. Vernon and wanted to stop, but were worried about getting to a campsite before dark. Finally, we found a service station where we discovered Alan had about 40lbs of pressure left in his back tire- which is supposed to be about 80lbs. Not good. We filled up the tire and stopped at a 7-11 to get some dinner to bring to the campsite which was about 2 miles away. It was a pretty dismal 7-11 and we ended up with yogurt (with a nut mix we had) and V8 for dinner. Oh, and Alan had a 7-11 doughnut. We headed to our campsite. But… you guessed it! It wasn’t there. Actually, it wasn’t even on the road we were told to take. It was, in fact, on another road with the exact same name in the same town. How does this happen, you ask? We have no idea. Fortunately, as we were super grumpy and preparing to ride the additional seven miles to the site, Dave, a nice man retiring from the army next year offered us a ride in his pickup. We gladly accepted, got dropped off at the campground and figured it was all over. Whew! Well, from then on it was only little things that went wrong. We couldn’t stake the tent in because there is concrete under the site. It’s supposed to rain. It is hot (still 75 degrees at 8pm), sticky and Alan’s fire failed because it is so humid even the sticks on the ground are wet. I feel like one of us is bound to stub a toe before this night is over. In fact, I may get in the tent now, curl up and pass out… tomorrow’s a new day- right? 
Oct 15 1 comments
Pennsylvania, Uncategorized, Virginia

From PA to MD to VA

We’re covered a lot of ground in the last few days. Last time we blogged we were in Manheim, PA and now we’re in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC! We’ll fill you in:
After leaving Manheim, we rode to York Furnace, PA in the Susquahanna River Valley and it was a, well, hilly ride. In fact, on that ride we decided if everyone had to ride bikes, we think it would prompt some changes in road names. For example, a certain two-mile curving uphill road without a shoulder might not be called “Pleasant Hill Road”, and a road that starts out flat before spiking straight upwards might not be called “Long Flat Road”. Needless to say we were fairly exhausted by the time to made it to York Furnace, and we slept well, enjoying the cool fall night that followed the long warm day. 

In a prior blog I mentioned that we ride past pretty farms and pretty woods. Well, after Manheim it turned into pretty farms and churches. We literally rode through two towns where all we saw were farms and churches. We did see this adorable little guy along the road though…
Awww… he was super cute and very friendly, but we had to press on to Maryland!

We crossed the Mason-Dixon Line with a fair degree of rejoicing, and found our way to a small town called Jarrettsville, MD where we stayed in the most beautiful farm field up on a hill. Here’s a shot of our tent in the field.

The land belongs to a wonderful couple, Betty and Bill, who have been farming it since 1968! We had a great night and were actually invited in for a delicious dinner and stayed up ’till 11 talking. We got up the next morning and Betty even cooked us breakfast before we took off for Baltimore!
Baltimore! Tricky to ride a bike into (there was lots of traffic), but we stayed downtown and had a nice time exploring the city.
The next morning we made the executive decision not to ride out of Baltimore and into DC. It was pretty scary riding in and we just didn’t feel good about the ride out of Baltimore and into DC… so we took the public transportation to DC! Here’s Alan on the DC Metro:
We got to DC and are staying with our friends Dan and Angie in a suburb in Virginia. Yesterday we went to the Holocaust Museum and the National Zoo, and today we’re staying at the house, working on updating our blog, our Photoshelter account and YouTube account… backing up files on our LaCie Rugged hard drives and to our LaCie ED Mini back in Portland! Check out our Photoshelter and YouTube accounts for the new stuff!