Robert Johnson – "Hellhound on My Trail" (1937)

Blues fallin’ down like hail

Blues fallin’ down like hail . . .

There’s a hellhound on my trail

[NOTE: What follows is an account of my recent group bicycle trip.  If you were on that trip with me, you may question the accuracy of what I’ve written because you were there.  So who are you going to believe – me, or your lying eyes?]

*     *     *     *     *

Wilderness Voyageurs was founded in 1964 to offer whitewater rafting adventures on the scenic Youghiogheny River in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Today the company also offers escorted bicycle tours.  

Earlier this month, I went on my fourth Wilderness bike tour – a three-day group trip along the Great Allegheny Passage, a 150-mile rail trail that runs from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cumberland, Maryland.

I was accompanied on the tour by my sister Terri and my sister-in-law Julie.  While they don’t spend much time on bicycles, both of them are former college athletes who are still in great shape.  So I wasn’t worried about their ability to keep up with the rest of the group.

*     *     *     *     *

My previous Wilderness Voyageurs trips have been terrific, and so was this one.  The route was very scenic, the weather was perfect, and – best of all – the tour group consisted of nine women and two men.  (Ten and one would have been even better but I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)

The Great Allegheny Passage

But most importantly, the tour was also a wonderful opportunity for me to spend time with my sister and sister-in-law, who live far away from me.  They seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves on the trip, which made me very happy.

*     *     *     *     *

Wilderness sends riders detailed written information about its bike tours.  Here’s an excerpt from its FAQs:

This is a ride not a race.  Every tour will have riders of varying abilities and interests, that means folks are all traversing the same route throughout the day but at their own pace, stopping to take pictures, read historical markers, or just plain relax. 

 

Later, the Wilderness FAQs reiterate this point: 

This is your vacation, not a race.

Terri and Julie must have skipped over those FAQs because they rode each day like there were hellhounds on their trail.

Did they stop during the three days of rides to take pictures?  Or to read historical markers?  Or to “just plain relax”?  

HELL no!

Approaching a tunnel on the GAP trail

As soon as our guides had completed our mandatory safety briefings each day, the two of them took off lickety-split and didn’t stop until it was time for the trailside luncheons that were prepared for us each day.  They scarfed down modest portions of green salad, fruit, and gluten-free bread and were back in the saddle quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

When I asked my sister-in-law why she was riding like her hair was on fire, she claimed to have thought that the riders on the tour were charged by the hour – so the sooner you got to the finish line each day, the more money you would save.

My sister explained her fast pace by saying she just wanted to get a good workout.  “I was only trying to get my heart rate up,” she said when we were driving back from our trip.

*      *      *      *      *

If there was a test for competitiveness, I’m pretty sure Terri (who is the only two-sport athlete in her college’s athletic hall of fame) and Julie (who is one of the winningest college volleyball coaches of all time) would score in the 99th percentile.  

I’m not sure whether they were motivated more by a desire to beat each other to the end of each day’s ride, or to beat me.

I suspect the latter.  In any event, it didn’t work – I finished ahead of them two of the three days, despite the fact that I am significantly older and have become a one-legged bike rider due to nerve problem in my left leg that resulted from a herniated disk.  (After performing two surgeries on that disk, my doctor ordered me a handicapped hangtag for my car.  You would think two former college athletes would be able to beat a handicapped old man.  But nooooo!)  

A visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed
 Fallingwater was a highlight of our trip

One of the other riders in the group later disclosed that Terri and Julie had told her that they had let me finish first just to be nice.  

But I don’t let that kind of thing bother me.  I’ve been an object of envy all my life.

*     *     *     *     *

As noted above, this was my fourth Wilderness trip but Terri and Julie’s first.

I was a little worried when they were nowhere to be seen when our group assembled for breakfast on day two of our trip.  I was afraid they were going to be late that morning and delay the group’s departure.  

“Punctuality” is my middle name – when I tell someone that I will pick them up between 2:30 and 3:00, you can best believe I will be there at precisely 3:05 – but my sister didn’t inherit that gene.  

When I texted her and asked where she was, she responded that she and Julie had just finished a 40-minute cardio workout in the hotel gym, and would be down to join the group momentarily.

Think about that.  We had ridden 39 miles on the first day of the trip.  But they felt the need for a brisk 40-minute session on an elliptical trainer before heading out on the second day’s 36-mile ride.

*     *     *     *     *

“Hellhound on My Trail” was recorded by the legendary Delta blues musician Robert Johnson in 1937.  Music historians consider it to be Johnson’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest blues records ever.

Click here to listen to “Hellhound on My Trail.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

Pete Seeger – "Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch" (1959)

Where, oh where, is pretty little Susie?

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch

On the first two days of my recent three-day guided bike tour, I and my ten fellow bikers rode on the Great Allegheny Passage or “GAP” trail – an unpaved but relatively smooth rail trail that begins in Pittsburgh, PA, and ends in Cumberland, MD.

On day three, we rode the westernmost 30 miles of the C&O Canal towpath – which was bumpier and, in places, muddier.

*     *     *     *     *

We left our Cumberland hotel and hit the C&O bright and early on a gorgeous September day.  Unfortunately, there were several major mudholes on the towpath, and a couple of our group’s members took a tumble as a result.

The C&O Canal towpath

The trail was drier and a little smoother after the first ten miles, but it was still a slower ride than the day before – that’s because the part of the GAP Trail that we had ridden on the previous day features a 1.5% downhill grade, while the C&O towpath is purt near level.

Factor in the fatigue that we were all feeling after riding 75 miles in our first two days, and you can understand why we were happy to get the damned ride over with.

*     *     *     *     *

Our guides laid out lunch just before the towpath passed through the Paw Paw Tunnel, which was by far the most interesting thing we saw on our day three ride.

The Paw Paw Tunnel is a 0.6-mile-long structure that was built to bypass a series of five horseshoe bends along the Potomac River.  If the towpath had followed the twists and turns of the Potomac rather than going through the tunnel, it would have added more than five miles to the length of a canal trip.

The western entrance to the Paw Paw Tunnel

Work on the tunnel began in 1836, and it was supposed to take two years to complete.  In fact, it took 14 years to finish and cost almost 20 times as much as it was supposed to.  

*     *     *     *     *

The towpath within the Paw Paw Tunnel is extremely narrow, and the tunnel isn’t lighted.  I had a headlight for my bike, but it was what a Louisiana friend of mine would call a piss-po’ headlight.

I rode a short distance within the tunnel just to say I had, then walked the rest of the way.

Inside the Paw Paw Tunnel

*     *     *     *     *

If you’re wondering where the Paw Paw Tunnel’s name comes from, it comes from the pawpaw tree, which is native to eastern North America.

In 1541, Spanish explorers reported that native Americans cultivated the pawpaw tree for its fruit, which has a very soft texture and tastes vaguely like a banana.  (Maybe that’s why it’s also called the Indian Banana, the West Virginia Banana, the Hoosier Banana, the Appalachian Banana, the Ozark Banana, etc.)   

Chilled pawpaws were a favorite dessert of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson grew pawpaw trees at Monticello.  

Our guide gathered a few pawpaw fruits from trees growing between the C&O towpath and the Potomac, and sliced them up for us to sample:  

To be perfectly honest, the pawpaw doesn’t do much for me.   

*     *     *     *     *

After our pawpaw-tasting session was over, the guides loaded our bikes on to the roof of our van.  We then loaded ourselves in the van and settled back for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Ohiopyle, PA, where we had parked our cars at the beginning of our trip.

We said our goodbyes and hit the road to drive to our respective homes in Colorado, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Maryland.

In my case, I hit the Falls City Pub and had one for the road first.  (Yes, I said one – not that it’s any of your business.)

*     *     *     *     *

“Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch” is an American folk song that’s over 100 years old.

Click here to listen a 1959 recording by the legendary folksinger Pete Seeger, his daughter Mika, and the Rev. Larry Eisenberg.

Click on the link below to buy a recording of the song by Burl Ives from Amazon:

Simon & Garfunkel – "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" (1970)

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright

I can't believe your song is gone so soon

I barely learned the tune

Several years, the staff of Smithsonian magazine published an article titled “28 Places to See Before You Die.”

The sites on their list include both manmade structures (the Pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal) and natural wonders (Mount Kilimanjaro, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef, the Iguazu Falls).

There’s no way I’ll ever cross most of those sites off my personal “life list” – I’ve never been to Antarctica, Easter Island, the Serengeti desert, or the Yangtze River, and there’s almost zero chance that I ever will visit those places.

In fact, the only place on the list that I had seen before last week was the Grand Canyon.  

Fallingwater

But I recently visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic building, Fallingwater, which is probably the most surprising of the sites on the Smithsonian magazine’s list.

At first blush, Fallingwater isn’t in the same league as places like Pompeii and Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu.  After all, it’s just a house – and a relatively small house at that.  

*     *     *     *     *

When you tour Fallingwater, you’re struck by the innumerable details that demonstrate Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius.  But the whole of Fallingwater is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

By definition, buildings demarcate the indoors from the outdoors.  But even when you are indoors at Fallingwater, you somehow are outdoors as well.

One way Wright accomplished this was to forbid curtains, blinds, or other window coverings.    

Another essential element of Fallingwater are the terraces that accompany each of the house’s rooms.

The windows demand that you look outside, while the terraces demand that you go outside.

My bike tour group prepares
to enter Fallingwater

Fallingwater is not a place for catching up on work or watching TV.  It’s a place for gazing at wildflowers in the spring or turning leaves in the fall, and for listening to the murmur of the waterfalls that the house was built above – a murmur that is ever-present regardless of where within Fallingwater you are.

Click here to learn more about Fallingwater.

*     *     *     *     *

A tour of Fallingwater was included in the three-day group biking tour I took part in last week.

At first, I wondered why we were spending the morning walking through Wright’s house instead of riding our bikes.  After all, we had a lot of ground to cover on day two of that trip, and our visit to Fallingwater meant that it would be after noon before we hit the trail.

On day one of our trip, we rode 32 miles before breaking for lunch.  But on day two, we had to ride 32 miles after lunch.

At the Mason-Dixon Line:
I'm in PA, they're in MD

Not only that, but the first several miles of our postprandial route were slightly uphill.

Once we reached the Eastern Continental Divide, it was downhill all the way.  We lost almost 1800 feet of elevation over the next 25 miles.

And while a 1.5% downhill grade may not sound like much, it was enough to enable me to average 15 or 16 mph – about 20% faster than my average speed on more level ground the previous day.  (I spent much of the afternoon in a gear that I had never used before – I had never taken a ride where I could ride fast enough for long enough to get into that gear.)

*     *     *     *     *

The last 116 miles or so of the Great Allegheny Passage (“GAP”) bike trail parallels a working railroad track.  

That railroad line and the bike trail share the 914-foot-long Brush Tunnel, which was built in 1911:

Click here to see a video that shows you what it would be like to be in the tunnel when a train passes through it.

*     *     *     *     *

I was the first of our group to reach Cumberland, MD, where our second day’s ride ended.  I was more motivated than my fellow riders – I had handed one of our guides a cooler full of beer to stick in our luggage trailer that morning, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a cold one.  (Maybe two.)

After a hearty meal at an old-fashioned Italian restaurant in downtown Cumberland, it was early to bed so we’d be early to rise the next morning for day three of our group bike tour – which I’ll describe in the next 2 or 3 lines.

*     *     *     *     *

“So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” was released in 1970 on Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album.  It’s not much of a song, but there aren’t a lot of songs about Frank Lloyd Wright to choose from.

Click here to listen to “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: 

Julian Cope – "Psychedelic Revolution" (2012)

If you’re a greedhead, you’re going down

If you’re a fat cat, you’re going down

If you’re a moneybags, you’re going down

The greedheads, fat cats, and moneybags – moneybagses? – who made up the “Fuller Syndicate” hoped to create a transcontinental railroad by buying up a number of smaller, interconnecting railroads.

But the financial crisis that resulted in the stock market falling 50% in October 1907 threw a monkey wrench into their plans.  Several of the railroads that were controlled by the syndicate were forced into bankruptcy, and that was that.

The easternmost of the syndicate’s railroads was the Western Maryland Railway, which operated independently after the Panic of 1907 brought an end to the syndicate.  It hauled mostly coal from West Virginia and Pennsylvania to Baltimore, which was the railroad’s eastern terminus.  

The Western Maryland Railway’s logo

In 1975, the Western Maryland merged with a larger railroad that served the same territory.  So most of the its lines were abandoned in favor of those of its merger partner – including a 90-mile-long spur line that ran northwest from Cumberland, MD, to Connellsville, PA. 

A few years later, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad – another railroad that depended on coal for most of its revenues – decided to abandon a 60-mile-long line that continued from Connellsville to Pittsburgh, PA.  

By putting those two connecting railroad lines together, you had a continuous 150-mile-long abandoned rail corridor just waiting for someone to turn it into a hiker-biker trail.

*     *     *     *     *

The Great Allegheny Passage – or “GAP” – got its start when a nonprofit group acquired the chunk of the Western Maryland’s right of way that ran through Pennsylvania’s Ohiopyle State Park, which includes more than 14 miles of the best whitewater-rafting river in the eastern United States, the Youghiogheny.  In 1986, that group opened a 9.5-mile-long stretch of rail trail to the public.

The GAP Trail project really took off in 1995, when seven trail-building groups formed the Allegheny Trail Alliance. 

The GAP Trail

Construction moved in fits and starts over the next two decades, but the final piece of the GAP Trail opened in 2013.  

And since the C&O Canal towpath connects to the GAP Trail in Cumberland, that meant you could ride all the way from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC – a distance of 330 miles – without worrying about cars.

*     *     *     *     *

Wilderness Voyageurs is one of several companies that offers guided bike rides along the GAP and C&O.  

The company offers a six-day tour that goes all the way from Pittsburgh to the nation’s capital, but that requires you to ride as much as 73 miles in a single day.  (I don’t know how your ass would feel about riding a bike 73 miles in a single day, but my ass said NO F*CKING WAY when I asked it what it thought about trying that.)

The Wilderness Voyageurs HQ in Ohiopyle, PA

So I signed up instead for a condensed, three-day GAP/C&O ride that required “only” 106 miles of riding.  (That’s more than I’ve ever ridden a bike in three consecutive days, but I was able to talk my ass into giving it a shot.)

Last Saturday, I cleaned and lubed my bike, packed every pair of padded bike shorts I owned, and drove to a cheap hotel near Wilderness Voyageurs’ Ohiopyle headquarters, ready to hit the trail early the next morning.

*     *     *     *     *

I introduced myself to the other members of the tour while our guides loaded our luggage and the food and drinks that would sustain us through the 39 miles we would ride on day one of the tour

Our merry little band of bike riders

Our merry little band consisted of three married couples, two pairs of female friends, and me.  I had expected to be the oldest person on the trip, but I wasn’t: most of my fellow travelers were within a few years of me in age.  (Two of the women on the trip were significantly younger, but they certainly weren’t spring chickens.) 

Almost immediately after saddling up, we rode past the Youghiogheny River’s Ohiopyle Falls – not something I would ever want to take on in a kayak, but a lot of people do exactly that:

A kayaker takes on Ohiopyle Falls

*     *     *     *     *

After 16 miles of riding, we took a breather in Connellsville, the only sizable town on this stretch of the GAP trail.  Our guides had laid out a spread of rice crackers with peanut butter, carrot sticks, apples, and the like for us.

Chowing down in Whitsett

We then rode another 16 miles or so to Whitsett, a tiny hamlet that was once a company town built to house coal miners and their families.  After chowing down on some turkey-bacon-avocado-tomato wraps, we mounted our bikes and rode a few more miles to the 479-acre Cedar Creek Park, which was the end of our first day’s ride.

At milepost 100 of the GAP Trail

Once the guides had loaded our bikes on to the roof of our 15-seat van, it was time for an hour’s drive to the Trillium Lodge, which was our destination for the evening.  After beer and wine on the lodge’s wraparound deck, it was time for a guide-cooked meal.  Everyone was in bed by 10 PM.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about our second day’s journey from Meyersdale, PA to Cumberland, MD – which is the end of the line for the GAP trail.

*     *     *     *     *

You probably remember Julian Cope’s 1986 hit single, “World Shut Your Mouth.”  I prefer his follow-up release, “Trampolene,” which I featured in a lengthy 2014 post about Cope.   Click here to read that post, which discusses Cope’s love of Krautrock music and his expertise regarding Neolithic and Bronze Age archeological sites in the UK and Europe.

Today’s featured song, “Psychedelic Revolution,” is the title track of Cope’s 2012 double album of the same name:

Cope, who is about as left-wing as it’s possible to be, dedicated that album to Che Guevara and Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist who became the first female to participate in an airplane hijacking in 1969.  (Khaled later underwent six plastic surgeries in hopes of changing her appearance enough that she could participate in future hijackings without being recognized.)

Click here to listen to “Psychedelic Revolution.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: