October 2, 2021
Little Orleans to Cumberland
Day 4
Day 4 Saturday 10/2/21
What a miserable night. The bivy/tent is tight. The sleeping bag is tight. I am hot. I am cold. I can’t move enough to shed or put on clothes.The sleeping bag zipper keeps getting stuck. I have to crawl out of the bivy to do anything. I can’t get the pillow situation right. Too high, too low, too hard, too soft.
Around 4:30 a.m. I hear music and see lights. The music stops. I see two people at the water pump. They fill up and ride off south into the cold, dark night.
After a restless night, I make breakfast in the cool, misty morning. It takes over an hour to wash, break down, pack camp and load the bicycle. By 9 a.m., I am on my way in a slight drizzle.
I head toward Cumberland with the knowledge that the Paw Paw tunnel is closed and the detour is a bit of a bear.
A few miles from camp, the detour sign appears. I go down to check the security of the construction lock, figuring it’s Saturday and no one is working. I pass on going into the work zone. The detour is a fairly steep, mildly washed-out forest road. I push my saddlebag-laden bike up the slope, for about 45 minutes. I ride down the other side and break two spokes in the process. I tell my wife there’s a lot of weight on the back of the bike, she says there’s a lot of weight on the front too. Meaning me.
I later learn that I could have ridden a little ways into the Paw Paw Tunnel to get a feel for it from the north end. I continue toward Cumberland and stop at the Town Creek Campsite for lunch. Trains are chugging by on the other side of the river. It turns into a glorious afternoon.
A guy named Charlie rides up and we talked a bit. He is a Kubota tractor salesman. He says it’s about 15 miles to Cumberland. Maybe by tractor on 51, but I pedal 22 miles. I stop by Old Town to check out one of the last privately-owned bridges in the US. The toll taker lets me ride across for free after telling me it’s definitely the only private toll bridge between two States.
I had booked a room in the Cumberland Fairfield Inn but first I bring my bike into Cumberland Trail Connection to get my wheel repaired. The men take care of my broken spokes and true up my rim, lickety split. I wander around Cumberland and check out the architecture on Washington and Baltimore Streets. There, I run into Jon and Lisa. We have a great Italian dinner at Ottaviani. They spent the previous night at a Paw Paw B & B and said the host was a great conversationalist and was very knowledgeable about the trail. By now, we have reached the end of the C&O and the beginning of the GAP.
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