New Castle, PA to Mt. Lebanon, PA:

June 17, 2012

You can't get there from here.

Rhona was excited at the opportunity to get me out of bed earlier than usual at the prospect of a long day. Before we had gone a mile we realized the odometer was not registering, probably a dead battery. The GPS is a backup. For the third straight day as we cycled south we were met with a significant headwind. Even so we made good progress clocking 40 miles before noon. In Coraopolis we phoned my parents to let them know our whereabouts. According to our GPS we were 11 miles from their home as the crow flies. We planned to ride for a short distance on the Montour Railtrail then use our (designed for bicycle use) Garmin ETrex GPS as well as our smartphone maps to navigate to Mt. Lebanon. The GPS insisted on routing us on interstate highways although it was set to navigate for a bicycle. I've noticed it goes to extremes, sometimes routing off a perfectly good road with adequate shoulders into a residential neighborhood uphill and a longer distance. Other times it sends us onto limited access or high-speed highways. This afternoon's fiasco resulted in us taking four and a half hours to travel 22 miles. Fortunately a lady gave us directions which pointed us in the right direction. We still ended up cycling on Banksville Road during a busy time, the exact situation I was trying to avoid. We would have done better to cycle along the river closer to downtown Pittsburgh, cross the West End bridge and come up Banksville Rd. This is not a recommended route but better than being lost in GPS hell all afternoon. I had problems using the cellphone maps. One issue was trying to see the small print without reading glasses with reflections from the sun and sky. A bigger problem was not being able to orient the map because there was not always a needle pointing north. Sometimes the phone location was inaccurate which resulted in confusion. "Is this Maple or Elm?... "No, it's Sunday", (from the back of the tandem).

We cross the Ohio for the first time since our Underground Railroad tour last summer.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The Aliquippa Bridge across the Ohio River was closed for construction. Rhona knew where there is construction there will be a Port-a-John.

It was a little unnerving to get a close look at the rusted conditions underneath the girders on the bridge. It's a good thing they didn't wait any longer to repair this one.

Today's ride: 62 miles (100 km)
Total: 1,903 miles (3,063 km)

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