I AM SO PUMPED!!

I AM SO PUMPED!! I have a few pictures from my bicycle ride with Russ (Wooly) Kann to N.Y. in 1977. My memories of it are fading with age and that is sad. I was looking on Google Earth and I was able to find all the spots in the pictures. I was able to follow our trip from Warsaw, IN to Hicksville, OH to Grand Rapids, OH the first day (130 mi). That is where we planned to spend the night at Mary Jane Thurston State Park, but it wasn’t built yet. So we went into Grand Rapids and the local town Marshal let us camp in the town park on the Maumee River. We took our bath in the river and set up camp. It was a great first day. The only bad thing was that my Mother had been worried about me getting sun burned and gave me something that was new, sun screen. Well I put it on once and rode all day without reapplying. Wooly (Russ) and I both got burned pretty badly. I have pictures the next day with a tee shirt wrapped around my head until we got somewhere to get hats. No helmets back then. After that we went across OH into PA. We ran into a problem in PA. Wooly had good maps for secondary roads until we started getting into the mountainous areas of PA. We stopped at a town hall and asked about maps for smaller roads and they just laughed at us. The smaller roads were what they called loop roads. They went so far off the major roads the looped back down and joined the same road farther down. So we had to ride the major roads in the mountains along with the trucks. Not the best thing but we survived. We didn’t have computers on our bike back then so I don’t know how fast we went down those mountains but I know my eyes were watering after some of those runs. We could keep up with the cars going down some of the hills. Around Oil City PA we turned north and went in to NY State. The one picture is of me looking up at a sign for Peek & Peak Ski Area. Lots of hills. Sometime while in NY Wooly started having trouble with his Achilles tendon and the decision to turn back was made. We made it to Cleveland OH and tried to get back home by bus but they wouldn’t take our bikes. We tried to rent a car but we didn’t have credit cards. (1977 remember) We had enough cash but couldn’t cover the deposit and they wouldn’t take checks from two nuts on bikes. So we rode across the most dangerous bridge ever and on to Elyria OH where we called a friend and waited for a ride back home. Wooly couldn’t ride any further. We had no flats! And I was riding sew-ups (tubular tires). The next ride we did was to KY and I switched to clinchers and had two flats before I got out of our county. I have to appreciate our new technologies letting me relive my trip.