May 29, 2013
Day ride to Lititz
Covered bridge loop
The rains passed on in the night, leaving a high humidity heat wave in its wake that held for the remainder of our tour. Today's destination was nearby Lititz, a small Moravian community about 15 miles north of Lancaster. 15 miles seemed a bit short, so we navigated a large clockwise loop around Lancaster to get there, stopping by a half dozen of Lancaster County's many covered bridges along the way. We used pacoveredbridges.com to plan out this ride as well as the coming one, fitting in as many bridges as we could. It gave us a nice focus for this part of our journey and led us to some very quiet rural cycling.
The big surprise in store for us was how much climbing we did. Although we never climbed to an elevation higher than 400 feet, we netted almost 5,000 feet of climbing today in an endless series of short, steepish drops and rises as we dropped down to or back up from creeks and streams. Our ride profile resembled an EKG chart, with about 20 distinct little climbs. It is very pretty riding country and the bridges themselves were all great, but the 90 degree sun and the hills gradually took their toll and by late afternoon we had had enough and were ready to get out of the sun and off our saddles. We were very happy when we rolled into Lititz just in time for a meal and a beer.
After dinner in the village we cycled north into the county to our lodging for the night at The Coopers Inn. This was another of our favorite stopovers on the tour, in a historic 7th generation farmhouse. Our hostess Audrey was great - we enjoyed her company and her tour of their home and its impressive collection of historical artifacts, her insightful background on Lancaster county and its colorful history and residents, and the terrific breakfast spread she laid out the next morning. It came in a close second to the Speckled Trout in Waynesboro in the best breakfast of the tour contest.
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Today's ride: 62 miles (100 km)
Total: 714 miles (1,149 km)
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