What goes up must come down

One good thing about camping on top of a giant hill is that you have a very easy start to the next day. We zoomed out of French Creek State Park yesterday morning and back to the main route. The day's riding skirted around the edges of Philadelphia. It took us through Valley Forge where George Washington spent the winter of 1777-1778 while fighting the British who were occupying Philadelphia. Luckily relations across the pond are more harmonious now and I was able to cycle through. The Valley Forge National Historical Park had a great bicycle path through it, which gave us some relatively flat miles. Mike - always on the lookout for places to buy snacks from - spotted a cabin store as we passed the Washington Memorial Chapel. It may have been the best place we've had lunch yet. Can't say definitively as the panel is still contemplating the exact ranking of lunch spots. It had two options for veggie burgers. This is Pennsylvania, not Los Angeles. Incredible. They also had homemade fudge and shoofly pie. We bought it all.

Shoofly pie is a traditional cake made by the dutch in Pennsylvania since the late 1800s. To make shoofly pie, you first take a shoe (preferably leather, synthetic fabrics do not bake well), chop it into pieces, add a cupful of flies, and bake for 20 minutes at 400 deg F (200 deg C, gas mark 6). Nah, I'm joking. You actually make a pie first and then shoo a bunch of flies into the topping so they get stuck, hence the name "Shoofly pie". No, ok, I have no idea how to make shoofly pie. But I do know that I like it and it's very sweet. The dutch used to eat it for breakfast. That's the kind of breakfast I could get behind.

We reluctantly left the bicycle path and rejoined the hill roads of Pennsylvania as we neared our destination of Warminster. I got a flat a few miles from our hotel just as thunder started to rumble overheard. "Time to go!" was the cry as we rapidly replaced the tube and reassembled my bike.

Last night we stayed at a motel. It turns out there are not many campgrounds in the suburbs of Philadelphia and our requests to Warm Showers hosts were unsuccessful. We had considered staying at a cheaper AirBnB but it was 10 miles off the route. Ten miles off the route on one day means 10 miles off the route the next day too, resulting in an extra 20 miles of riding. We weighed the extra dollars against fewer miles and went for the motel.

We faced a similar dilemma this morning as we weighed our options for shelter this evening. We're now in New Jersey between Philadelphia and New York. There are no campgrounds near the route, no available Warm Showers hosts, and no AirBnBs either. So that left us contemplating whether we should book a hotel or just start riding and hope that we met someone on the road towards the end of the day who was willing to put us up. We went for the hotel, opting to define the finish line rather than risk getting to 65 miles and not finding somewhere to stay.

Today was our coldest day yet, starting out at 14 C (58 F) and reaching a whopping high of 17 C (63 F). Several times I thought about getting my arm warmers out but I was wearing a sleeveless top and decided it would look weird. Fashion first, people. As we neared New Hope, the final town we would visit in Pennsylvania, we saw a group of older cyclists ahead. Even though we were fully loaded and they had no gear we thought "We can catch them!" We could not. We chased behind them for a few miles until they turned off our route. We later saw them pass us by as we enjoyed a break at a bakery in New Hope.

We crossed the Delaware River into Somerset County (shout out to the Dimon family!), New Jersey, where the land seemed to flatten out a little. We chopped 5 miles off our day by taking a shortcut away from a particularly windy section of the route. In doing so, we passed through the town of Somerville, which was having some kind of street festival. We walked our bikes along Main Street and were just about to start riding again when a man came up to us to talk about touring. He's doing a tour this summer in New York state and asked if we needed a place to stay this evening. Ahhhh, should have winged it and not booked the hotel! Oh well. We thanked him and explained that we were continuing on a little further before stopping for the day. In the future, I think we'll try to loosen up a little and not be so rigid about having things booked in advance. Fortune favors the bold.

Tomorrow: New York, New York.

Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

Washington Memorial Chapel

New Hope

Delaware River

Going to New Jersey

Straddling the states

Street festival in Somerville, New Jersey