November 15, 2024
Planning and Travel
How to ride a 77 mile trail over a weekend that's 6 hours away.
The Greenbrier River Trail in West Virginia sits on so many lists as one of the best rail trails in America and I've been wanting to check it out for a couple years now. My friend Doug had been interested in riding it as well. So when he mentioned it about a year back, I started thinking about how we could fit an overnight trail ride on the Greenbrier that was six hours away into our schedule and get a group down from Baltimore to check it out with us.
We had a pretty busy fall calendar this year but we found a mid November weekend that looked open for a couple of us. So I penciled it in, crossed my fingers for good weather and we started planning things after we got back from a big European bike trip in September.
We were hoping to ride the whole trail (~77 miles) and not have to double back anywhere if possible. We thought it would be easiest to stay in one centrally located place on Friday and Saturday night and then figure out a way to get our van/trailer up to the north end of the trail in Cass Sunday morning, bike up to that point, then load up and head back to Baltimore.
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I think we would have preferred to ride north to south, because even though the trail's relatively flat, south to north is still a long steady climb of ~900 feet and there's very little coasting. After 20-30 miles of constant pedaling on gravel, it wears on you a little. But if we finished up on the south end of the trail Sunday it would make our trip back to Baltimore almost 2 hours longer then finishing at the north end. We all agreed we wanted to keep our bike ride short Sunday and try to get back into Baltimore before midnight. So we opted to ride south to north.
We found a place to stay in Marlinton that worked out really well and we scheduled a shuttle service to take us from Marlinton to Caldwell for Saturday's ride. Then we figured we could drop our van/trailer off in Cass early Sunday morning, catch an Uber back to Marlinton and ride from Marlinton up to Cass to complete the trail. That was the final plan we came up with and it would have been perfect IF there were actually Uber drivers near Cass in the Greenbrier trail area... (there were NOT - more to come on that later).
When our ride weekend finally came, (Nov 15-17) the weather forecast looked AMAZING - sunny skies Fri-Sun with temps in the 50s and 60s. So on Friday around 1:00 PM all five of us loaded up in our Honda Odyssey mini van, put our bikes in the trailer and headed towards West Virginia. There were beautiful views and plenty of sunset scenery as we made our way southwest down route 81 through Virginia and ultimately west from Harrisonburg towards Marlinton.
We stopped in the small town of Monterey Virginia for dinner at High's, a really cute little restaurant with over the top comfort food... Bacon "Jam" Burgers, the World's Greatest Meat Loaf, Fire and Ice deserts (4 scoops of ice cream sitting in a flaming bowl of moonshine) etc. We really enjoyed our dinner and as we left, we followed the directions on the sign which read "If we did WELL please ring our BELL"
We pulled into Marlinton around 8:00 Friday, made a quick stop at the DG Market a couple blocks away from our place to pick up some food supplies for the weekend. Then we headed to our cottage, unpacked our bikes and gear, settled down and played a little music before bed.
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